Former Sen. Al Franken will be making his first public appearance next month after his resignation from Congress earlier this year after multiple allegations of sexual misconduct were made against him.
Franken, a Democrat who represented Minnesota from 2009 to 2018, will speak at CyberScout’s Privacy Xchange Forum in Lisbon, Portgual on May 1.
According to a press release, he will discuss Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election and the “importance of making the protecting of consumer privacy a front burner issue.”
In a statement, Franken said that the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal is shocking “but nor surprising.”
“As a Senator, I fought to implement laws that would protect users’ persona information and raised the alarm about the growing influence of these new corporate giants,” he said. “Now, I’m coming to Lisbon to talk about what went wrong in the leadup to these scandals — and what we need to do to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
British-based Cambridge Analytica is a data consulting firm that was hired by President Trump’s 2016 election campaign. It improperly obtained the private information on more than 80 million Facebook users.
Earlier this month, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said at a panel that she thinks Franken might make a comeback.
“He’s had two acts and he’s still going to have a third,” Klobuchar, who said she still talks with Franken, reportedly told the crowd.
