On Wednesday, during a congressional hearing on protecting consumer data, Kennedy warned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that Congress may be forced to regulate the social media giant. Zuckerberg testified for two days this week to answer questions related to how a political consulting firm harvested personal data from some 87 million Facebook users.
"The data breach at Facebook showed the world that the digital promised land is not all milk and honey. We’ve discovered some impurities in the punch bowl," Kennedy said in the release on Thursday. "I don’t want to regulate Facebook half to death, but there are things that need to be changed. Our bill will help protect Americans’ online data fingerprint."
In March, it was made public that personal information of up to 87 million Facebook users had been harvested by the Cambridge Analytica consultancy firm without their permission. While working for major political campaigns, the firm gathered data to develop a mechanism that would predict and influence the behavior of US voters.