Modiji, your ‘Mark’ is a marked man in India

TT: Under fire in the US and Europe, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday ran into a fearsome enforcer called “the IT minister of India”.

“Mr Mark Zuckerberg, you better note the observation of the IT minister of India. We welcome the FB profile in India, but if any data theft of Indians is done through collusion of FB systems, it shall not be tolerated,” Union IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad thundered, warning that the FB chief could be summoned to India.

Prasad was addressing a media conference where he accused the Congress of hiring the services of Cambridge Analytica, which has been accused of improperly accessing information on millions of Facebook users to target US voters. The Congress denied the charge and accused the BJP of using the same firm earlier. 

Until now, the Facebook co-founder had seen only the misty-eyed side of an Indian leader who used to call  him “Mark”. Prime Minister Narendra Modi (in file picture above), visiting the Facebook headquarters at Menlo Park in California in 2015, was overcome by emotion when he recalled how his mother had toiled to bring up her children. “Bartan saaf karna, paani bharna... m-mazdoori karna,” Modi had choked on his own broken words while replying to a question.

In his first comments on the Analytica controversy, Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that Facebook “made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.”