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Does he just have some cognitive dissonance, is he covering up, or does he really not understand how his business operates? I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -Upton Sinclair
I think the whole point of this is to raise awareness about of the scope of Facebook's data collection-- It's unfathomably enormous.
If more average people had a better understanding of what Facebook was tracking, they'd be outraged. Zuckerberg's goal in this was to keep the wool pulled over their eyes. That's why he kept conflating post-visibility settings with privacy / tracking settings.
I think the questions were also horrible. Watching two days of testimony it seemed only Congresswoman Dingell from Michigan had any grasp of how tracking technology works. My big takeaway is that we need more engineers in congress.
That's a pretty disingenuous way to phrase Zuckerberg's response to a question of whether Facebook uses cookie tracking for logged-out users. Which of course it does, and it's of course used for security purposes; one has to be able to unify sessions from people with multiple accounts to do the most basic of bad-actor tracking against the most basic of attack scenarios.
This sort of information gathering is necessary for DDoS/Spam/Fraud prevention and so on. I'm not saying I trust Zuckerberg wasn't hiding something else, but also I understand why he didn't want to publicly comment on the heuristics they use to combat attackers.
Although at this point I don't know why Zuckerberg would be obfuscating if they really have detailed advertising profiles on logged-out users. (What would said advertising profiles be used for? Selling them to other advertisers?)
Here's how Zuckerberg's testimony works: 1. When he says he doesn't know, he actually knows. 2. When he says he knows, and that the answer is "more AI," he doesn't actually know.
I don't think we have reason to believe the CEO is deeply familiar with all the strategies FB uses for session unification and user tracking. It's a fast-moving field with a lot of technical detail that a CEO doesn't actually need to keep day-to-day tabs on.
""" Zuckerberg reluctantly acknowledged that Facebook gathers information on people who aren't signed up for Facebook for what he said were "security purposes." """ That's a pretty disingenuous way to phrase Zuckerberg's response to a question of whether Facebook uses cookie tracking for logged-out users. Which of course it does, and it's of course used for security purposes; one has to be able to unify sessions from…
So why should anyone trust him? People should use open source social networks that can be audited.
Hell, I've been a Facebook app developer. I'm deeply familiar with the breadth and depth of information Facebook allowed an app to harvest ca. 2008 or so.
I still use FB multiple times a day because I don't care about my privacy vis-a-vis the things I post there and that my friends post there.