Cameraperson: Abhay Sharma
Video Editor: Puneet Bhatia
The year 2018 was marred by a plethora of controversies where representatives from big tech companies like Google, Facebook and even the social media platform Twitter were summoned to testify in front of the US Senate and even the Congress.
The six-hour grueling hearing where Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was at the receiving end of a lot of questions regarding data security, user data policy and even the company’s responsibilities towards user data, was the beginning of the many testimonies that were to follow this year.
Subsequently, Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey and Google’s big boss, Sundar Pichai too had to face a barrage of questions from congressmen and senators who to many didn’t have a clue about “how technology works.”
In August, Facebook and Twitter executives Sheryl Sandberg and Jack Dorsey appeared in front of the US Congress to defend their respective platforms and to cajole the representatives of the house that their respective companies are aggressively trying to root out foreign actors who’d want to do the United States harm.
In December, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai appeared before a US Congressional hearing in Washington to answer questions related to privacy, data sharing policy and plans of a search engine for China.
Amongst all of this hullaballoo, even India’s minister for information and technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad, had issued a statement about summoning the Facebook CEO to India if need be.
Now, just imagine if these top CEOs had agreed to testify in India and be absolutely honest with their responses. The Quint has a contrarian view to this where the CEOs of ‘coincidentally similar’ companies Tracebook, Boggle and Bitter agreed to testify in an Indian court. And testify ‘honestly’.
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