The standing committee on communications and information technology, headed by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, will hear the leaders for 30 minutes.
The call came a day after reports emerged that Twitter’s former security chief Peiter Zatko had alleged that the social media broker “misled” regulators in the United States as well as the microblogging platform’s board of directors about its efforts to protection against hackers, as well as bots and spam.
Zatko, also known as ‘Mudge’, has alleged in his complaint to US federal authorities, including the Federal Trade Commission, that the Indian government forced Twitter to keep one of its agents on its payroll that had access to user data even during protests against the current 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complaint, Zatko also alleged that he had warned his colleagues that half of the company’s servers were running out of outdated and vulnerable software.
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He also claimed that Twitter executives hid dire facts about the number of breaches and the lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with pink charts that measured insignificant changes.
Responding to ET’s questions on the news report, a spokesperson for Twitter said that Zatko “was terminated 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 filled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lacks important context.”
The spokesperson said that security and privacy will remain “company-wide priorities” and that “Zatko’s claims and opportunistic timing appear designed to attract attention and cause harm to Twitter, its customers and shareholders.”
