How tech baffled an elderly Congress
digitaledition.baltimoresun.com
How tech baffled an elderly Congress
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Re: How tech baffled an elderly Congress
#2Since this is apparently a verbatim repost of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18813468, I'm going to repost my (lightly edited) comment from that empty thread since I think it's a crap article with some serious flaws.
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This is a really disappointing article. I'd like to agree with the premise, but some of the specific examples they chose to use seem a more than a little unfair.
> There were the agonizing video clips from April’s Facebook hearing, in which 68-year-old Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) attempted to ask Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg a question about data privacy, and revealed a conception of social media resembling a wad of tangled Christmas lights: “Do you track devices that an individual who uses Facebook has that is connected to the device that they use for their Facebook connection, but not necessarily connected to Facebook?”
Yeah, sure, the phrasing is not great, but interpreted charitably there's a decent question in there:
> If I use Facebook on my desktop computer but don't use it on my phone, does Facebook still associate activity on my phone (e.g. browsing, location, payments) with my Facebook profile?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the answer's almost definitely yes given existing info[1], and that that answer would be somewhat disquieting to even the most tech-impaired senator.
> Come December it was the Google chief Sundar Pichai’s turn to visit the Capitol and watch Rep. Steve Cohen, the 69-year-old Democrat from Tennessee, wave his hands in the air and complain: “I use your apparatus often, or your search engine, and I don’t understand all of the different ways that you can turn off the locations. There’s so many different things!”
Google has an established track record[2] of forcing users to toggle multiple settings to achieve a simple goal: "stop tracking location history!" Cohen is fairly clearly referring to that issue. If frequent users can't figure out how to disable location history due to dark UX patterns, that's a problem.
So, again, actually a pretty reasonable question that hits close to a lot of fevered discussion in our circles[3].
This strikes me as, ironically enough, a technically illiterate reporter trawling for bad-sounding Twitter-length excerpts while ignoring any of the underlying issues.
At least the article goes on to quote Hatch's communications director:
> “Perhaps one part of the problem is Congress-illiteracy among tech reporters.”
> Maybe so. [continues to address tenuously related claims about the age of Congress, which in itself plays into avocado-toast tier reporting by generalizations]
What? That's got to be the weakest dismissal of a critique of the shallow reporting model underlying pieces like this that I've ever seen.
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[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/03/facebook-...
[2] https://www.techlicious.com/blog/google-tracking-after-locat...
Re: How tech baffled an elderly Congress
#3This a good article but I would add that quoting a YouTube comment in a serious context also shows a critical lack of understanding of what the internet is and how its content should be regarded. The comment in question could be posted by the author or the subject of discussion without the reader having any way of determining or suspecting that fraud. The same cannot be said of a direct quote. It seems like the author was parsing YouTube comments to get an idea of what the young people who “get it” had to say and that absurd notion stayed with me throughout the article. Unlike the author scrolling through YouTube comments, I was questioning the quality and genuineness of what I was reading.
Doing so later led me to ask: are Senators who know how to text each other the most technologically knowledgeable people in Congress? Is that really good enough to inspire hope in the author?
Re: How tech baffled an elderly Congress
#4> average age 58 in the House, 62 in the Senate.
This right here is the main issue. The median age in the US is 38. Even if you remove people under 18 which cannot serve in Congress, that would raise the median to ~47.
Re: How tech baffled an elderly Congress
#5Putting term limits for Senators is a good way to get rid of this old club and bring new blood. Some senators are there for their life.
Re: How tech baffled an elderly Congress
#6> average age 58 in the House, 62 in the Senate. This right here is the main issue. The median age in the US is 38. Even if you remove people under 18 which cannot serve in Congress, that would raise the median to ~47.
The constitutional age limitation for serving in Congress is 25 for the House and 30 for the Senate.
Re: How tech baffled an elderly Congress
#7> Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., attempted to ask Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg a question about data privacy, and revealed a conception of social media resembling a wad of tangled Christmas lights: “Do you track devices that an individual who uses Facebook has that is connected to the device that they use for their Facebook connection, but not necessarily connected to Facebook?”
This seems like a very legitimate question. He wants to know if Facebook tracks e.g. your FitBit. It's connected to your phone, and your phone is connected to Facebook, but your FitBit isn't connected to Facebook. And to be honest, I don't know the answer to that question. I would hope that they can't, but knowing the state of the tech world (IoT: the 'S' stands for security), it's probably possible, and knowing what we know about Facebook, if it's possible they are probably doing it.
Not that Zuckerberg would necessarily know or confess to it before the Senate, but that's a separate issue (I often wonder what is the point of calling a corporate executive to DC anyway, since they have every reason to dissemble and no reason to cooperate in good faith).
Re: How tech baffled an elderly Congress
#8> We don’t yet have comprehensive age data for the next Congress
Am I understanding this correctly? As of January 2[0], the day before the new session began, no one had yet compiled a full list of the ages of all members of Congress? That's baffling to me. Have an intern go look through the Wikipedia articles for each one of them.
[0] There's no mention of the in the Baltimore Sun article, but https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/theres-so-man... is dated 2019-01-02.
Re: How tech baffled an elderly Congress
#9> Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., attempted to ask Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg a question about data privacy, and revealed a conception of social media resembling a wad of tangled Christmas lights: “Do you track devices that an individual who uses Facebook has that is connected to the device that they use for their Facebook connection, but not necessarily connected to Facebook?” This seems like a very legitimate…
> I often wonder what is the point of calling a corporate executive to DC anyway, since they have every reason to dissemble and no reason to cooperate in good faith
Showboating, I've always assumed. A good deal of the questioning was clearly grandstanding, and a good number of the questions asked could have been answered by the Senators' grandchildren.
That said, if you want to grandstand, you should first run your questions by your grandchildren so they can tell you about online advertising and such, lest you look like a fool on national television.
Re: How tech baffled an elderly Congress
#10Since this is apparently a verbatim repost of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18813468 , I'm going to repost my (lightly edited) comment from that empty thread since I think it's a crap article with some serious flaws. --- This is a really disappointing article. I'd like to agree with the premise, but some of the specific examples they chose to use seem a more than a little unfair. > There were the agonizing vid…
Yes, I actually don't see anything in that article that makes me come close to doing a facepalm. Some of the questions aren't the most elegantly worded but I'd be a lot more concerned if someone expressed surprise that users were tracked or data kept or some other naive lack of understanding of how social media and ad networks operate.
>revealed a conception of social media resembling a wad of tangled Christmas lights
That actually seems like a pretty good analogy. I might use it someday.
There's also the sort of smug superiority that one often sees directed at everyone who isn't as immersed in a particular field as the speaker or writer.