NEW DELHI: E-commerce giant Amazon has refused to appear before the Joint Committee of Parliament on the Data Protection Bill on October 28 and this amounts to breach of privilege, panel chairperson and BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi said on Friday.
Lekhi said that "the panel is unanimous in its opinion that coercive action can be suggested to the government against the e-commerce company".
"Amazon has refused to appear before the panel on October 28 and if no one on behalf of the e-commerce company appears before the panel it amounts to breach of privilege," she told PTI.
Meanwhile, Facebook's policy head Ankhi Das appeared before the panel on the issue of data security on Friday.
Facebook India representatives were asked some tough and searching questions by the members of the panel, sources said.
During the meeting, a member suggested that the social media giant should not draw inferences from the data of its users for commercial benefits of its advertisers.
The panel has summoned officials of micro-blogging site Twitter on October 28, and Google and Paytm on October 29.
The development comes a day after social media giants Facebook and Twitter were issued summons by the panel on the issue of protection of data and its privacy.
Representatives of Facebook India have been asked to appear on Friday before the panel, while Twitter officials are required to appear on October 28, as per the notice issued by the Lok Sabha Secretariat.
Summoning officials of Amazon and Google on the same issue were also under active consideration of the joint committee of Parliament, the sources said.
Lekhi said on Thursday, "Whosoever iso required, whether an individual or an entity, will be asked to depose before the panel on the issue of protection of data and its privacy and their respective social media platforms will be thoroughly examined by the panel."
"It would be inappropriate and unfair to look at the calling of social media platform from the political prism. The committee has representatives from across the political spectrum and the deliberations on the bill are being held from the national interest perspective," she had said.
Meanwhile, the Centre on Thursday warned Twitter about its location setting that showed Leh in China, saying any disrespect towards the country's sovereignty and integrity is totally unacceptable.
In a strongly-worded letter, Ajay Sawhney, Secretary in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to respect the country's sensitivities, sources in the ministry said.
Twitter came under heavy criticism and faced backlash from social media users after its geotagging feature displayed "Jammu & Kashmir, People's Republic of China" in a live broadcast from Leh's Hall of Fame, a war memorial for fallen soldiers in the Union Territory of Ladakh.
Last month, Union Information and Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had also written to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and accused the social media platform's employees of supporting people from a political predisposition that lost successive elections, and of "abusing" the Prime Minister and senior cabinet ministers.
The parliamentary standing committee on Information and Technology chaired by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor had also summoned Facebook officials on the alleged misuse of its hate speech rules.
(With PTI Inputs)