Sen. Durbin just talked Zuckerberg out of a qualification that certain children's data "in general" will not be shared with third parties. He pinned Zuck to a no, because "as a lawyer" he picked up on it. There's a perfectly valid reason for the "in general" qualification! If your child is using the app and police obtain a warrant for the data, Facebook will likely have to release it! I wonder how much Zuck's desire to be "straightforward" and answer questions unequivocally here is causing Facebook counsel to cringe.
Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
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Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#92Am I missing something? Take the Senator who spoke about monopolies. An oil monopoly is bad because we all need to get to work and trains need to run. Microsoft monopoly, arguable but I can see how it can be bad. All companies end up using Microsoft and this affects everyone, hospitals, schools ... Facebook is optional, we won't starve, hospitals won't close, aeroplanes will continue if we delete Facebook. Is this an…
He failed to answer a simple question of who can their users migrate over to when they are not happy. Wonder if that will come back to hurt him.
It probably will come back to haunt him. I just feel all sorts of other issues are being blamed on Facebook. Humans can be horrible, there was a genocide in Rwanda. Facebook wasn't needed (not sure it was around back then). If we going to blame Facebook we might as well blame the Mobile phones for enabling us to have Facebook. I feel they should stick to the privacy issues which are true issues.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#93It's pretty cringe-y so far. From The Verge's liveblog: "I would liken this hearing so far to a precocious college junior explaining his major to his grandparents at Thanksgiving"
It's a really odd line of questioning from people who don't seem to understand the subject matter. This gem made me laugh out loud: Senator: How do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service? Zuckerberg (in a disdainful tone): Senator, we run ads. https://clips.twitch.tv/FantasticCrowdedDelicataPipeHype Edit: I directly transcribed the exchange
I think you're misunderstanding the intent: obviously they are aware of that. Hearings commonly involve asking basic questions
Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#94Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#95Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#96There seem to be multiple feeds with different angles. The one posted by the Guardian is currently pointed at the current person speaking, e.g. the Senators. Bloomberg, though, has a feed in which the camera is focused on Zuckerberg's face for the entirety of the hearing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyJosQBtzsw
It's lovely that they put the Facebook stock ticker on top of the video...
Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#97In case you want to check if a speaker has accepted contributions from FB (read "corrupt and failed to disclose conflict of interest") https://www.opensecrets.org/search?q=facebook&type=orgs
Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#98"Is it true facebook can track user browsers even after they are logged out of facebook?" Zuck: "I need to get back to you on that"
Facebook doesn't delete all cookies (for instance, there's an `sb` cookie still set) in their logout response. They may choose not to do anything with the cookies that remain, but the technical answer to the question is yes. And even if they currently did delete all cookies, there's nothing from preventing them from introducing cookies that do remain. Zuck knows this is generally feasible - he's a talented software e…
> They may choose not to do anything with the cookies that remain, but the technical answer to the question is yes.
I think you could say the same thing about IP addresses. A website might log the IP addresses of people who visit them, or they might not, but quite a lot of tracking is feasible. The problem with focusing on feasibility there, is that you end up with an answer like "yes, just like every other website in the world, Facebook can track you when you're logged out." Assuming Zuckerberg has been coached to High Heaven not to gives answers like that, it seems fair to respond to the question as though it was asking about the internal details of what Facebook does with cookies / IP addresses / browser fingerprints.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#99"Are you a monopoly?" "Doesn't feel that way" (laughter)
Actual question: am I missing something? I get that facebook is big and powerful, and way too many people use it for their own good, but I'm sitting here talking to a bunch of people on another platform right now. A large chunk of which (probably) don't use facebook after recent events. Maybe it's just because I haven't had facebook in well over 5 years, but I don't see them as a monopoly on anything at all.
Everyone has thousands of choices on how to share their data if they don't want to use facebook/instagram/whatsapp. Does the mere fact that they don't use those other choices make the 1 choice a monopoly?
Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#100The point about "not selling data to advertisers" and how Facebook is so totally different was so cringy.
Just one follow-up question was needed: if I take out 100 ads microtargeting users, what happens then?