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UK House of Commons’ Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee chair Damian Collins recently revealed his plans to launch a probe into Facebook Libra.
Collins is the same person who led the investigation into the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal that involved Cambridge Analytica harvesting personal data of Facebook users without their consent and using it for political advertising process. Now, he has set his sights on the social network’s crypto offering.
Collins recently talked about the plans to form a committee that will look into Libra and its various effects with Financial News. During the course of the discussion, the lawmaker noted how Facebook was practically “trying to turn itself into its own country.” This is the crux of the issue that regulators have with the idea of the stablecoin, with concerns about fraud also being a major point.
“If we’re going to have this payment system created by Facebook that exists within a Facebook walled garden, which no one really has access to or can question, then our concern has got to be that this system is going to be open to massive fraud,” Collins said.
For its part, Facebook has been repeatedly emphasizing that the social network and Libra are separate. This is the point that David Marcus from the tech giant was trying to make during a recent hearing with the US Senate, CoinDesk reports.
“You won’t have to trust Facebook to get the benefit of Libra,” Marcus had told US lawmakers. “And Facebook won’t have any special responsibility over the Libra Network. But we hope that people will respond favorably to [Libra’s] Calibra wallet. We’ve been clear about our approach to financial data separation and we will live up to our commitments and work hard to deliver real utility.”
This was not enough to dissuade regulators from being suspicious. Based on this new development in the UK, Collins and his fellow lawmakers will need much more from Facebook.
