Facebook data privacy scandal threatens fellow titans Google and Twitter as US Congress demands answers

US lawmakers want to grill the top executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter, the latest indication that the controversy surrounding Facebook’s data privacy practices now threatens to envelope the whole of Silicon Valley.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s chairman, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, on Monday scheduled an April 10 hearing on the “future of data privacy and social media” – and the panel said it would explore potential new “rules of the road” for those companies.

It’s the third such request that lawmakers have made of Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg to testify since it emerged earlier this month that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm hired by US President Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, may have improperly accessed names, “likes” and other personal information from at least 30 million Facebook users.

But the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing spells the first time that congressional lawmakers have expanded their scrutiny to include Zuckerberg’s peers, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The result could be a hearing that exposes both of those tech giants – whose data is not known to have been taken by Cambridge Analytica – to uncomfortable questions about the extent to which they profit from their users’ most personal data, too.

A spokesman for Zuckerberg, who last week expressed his openness to appear at a hearing, said Facebook is still reviewing the request. A spokeswoman for Twitter declined comment. Spokespeople for Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.