Data privacy row: Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg to testify before US Congress on April 11

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg will testify before the US Congress on April 11, latest US media reports said on Wednesday. 

The step is seen as a sign of him bowing to pressure from lawmakers insisting Zuckerberg explaining how 50 million users' data ended up in the hands of a political consultancy.

The US Senate Judiciary Committee had invited Zuckerberg, as well as the CEOs of Alphabet Inc and Twitter Inc to testify on data privacy. The US House Energy and Commerce Committee and US Senate Commerce Committee had already formally asked Zuckerberg to appear at a congressional hearing.

Lawmakers in the United States and Europe have been demanding to know more about the company's privacy practices after a whistleblower said consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed data to target US and British voters in close-run elections.

Earlier, Facebook had said the company had received invitations to testify before Congress and that they were talking to legislators. On March 16, Facebook had first acknowledged that user data had been improperly channelled to Cambridge Analytica, which was hired by Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

The data breach has raised investor concerns that any failure by big tech companies to protect privacy could deter advertisers and lead to tougher regulation. 

However, Zuckerberg had earlier turned down British lawmakers' invitations to explain to a British parliamentary committee what went wrong. The company had said it would instead send one of his deputies, suggesting that Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer or Chief Product Officer Chris Cox had the expertise to answer questions on the complex subject.

The head of the committee called Zuckerberg's decision "astonishing" and urged him to think again. Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower who once worked at Cambridge Analytica, had said that Canadian company AggregateIQ had developed the software that used the algorithms from the Facebook data to target Republican voters in the 2016 US election. 

In full-page advertisements in British and US newspapers, Zuckerberg had said the app built by a university researcher "leaked Facebook data of millions of people in 2014". He apologised for the mistakes the company had made and promised to restrict developers' access to user information as part of a plan to protect privacy.