The standing committee on communications and information technology, chaired by Congress’ Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor, will hear the executives for 30 minutes.
The summons came a day after reports emerged that
Twitter’s former head of security Peiter Zatko had alleged that the social media intermediary “deceived” regulators in the United States as well the microblogging platform’s own board of directors about its efforts in defence against hackers as well as bots and spam.
Zatko, also known as ‘Mudge’, has in his complaint to US federal authorities, including the Federal Trade Commission, alleged that the Indian government had forced Twitter to keep on its payroll one of its agents who had access to user data even during the protests against the incumbent government.
Zatko’s complaint to the FTC as well as the US Congress was first reported by The Washington Post on Tuesday. The complaint was made to the authorities in July.
In his complaint, Zatko also alleged that he had warned his colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software.
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He also alleged that Twitter executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes.
Responding to ET’s queries on the news report, a spokesperson for Twitter said Zatko “was fired from his senior executive role at Twitter in January 2022 for ineffective leadership and poor performance. What we’ve seen so far is a false narrative about Twitter and our privacy and data security practices that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lacks important context.”
The spokesperson said security and privacy would remain “company-wide priorities” and that Zatko’s “allegations and opportunistic timing appear designed to capture attention and inflict harm on Twitter, its customers and its shareholders.”
