Via TPM:
NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has agreed to testify in a second congressional hearing next week, this time in the Senate.
[…]
Lawmakers have called for Zuckerberg to appear personally after revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a Trump-linked political consulting firm, obtained data of tens of millions of users without their permission with the intent of swaying elections. The company has also been under scrutiny after Russians used Facebook and other social media to meddle in the 2016 elections.
Zuckerberg will be the only witness at the hearing.
Good.
I have strong feelings about Mark Zuckerberg. For some reason, the guy has always annoyed me, and given the tepid support and downright hostility by people that actually know him, it looks like I’m not alone in my feelings. Seriously, I haven’t read or heard a single interviewee rise to his defense – say he’s a good guy, that what happened was an accident, that he couldn’t have known, that he’s moving heaven and earth to fix the problem.
The most generous thing I can say about him is: Mark Zuckerberg is a coder. That’s it. He’s a coder. In charge of a social network – that makes privacy settings as confusing as possible. IMO, they had to be confusing in order to share your info. Like I’ve said many times before, it’s a feature, not a bug.
I don’t envy him his having to testify. Given his public statements so far, I predict it’ll be a PR nightmare for FaceBook. So much so, that I expect there will be calls for Zuckerberg to step down. Since the beginning, Zuckerberg has only admitted problems after someone else exposed them, and then he downplayed them. That leads me to believe that none of these revelations were unknown to him. This is a lose/lose situation for him. If he didn’t know, then he should have.
“Can you give us the names of all persons or entities who used personal data acquired through your company?”
He’s a coder who has a product whose business model relies on giving advertisers as much info on you as reasonably possible. The more they have to monitor or cut back on that, the less attractive they are to advertisers. Zuckerberg gets away with what we and Congress let him get away with. The EU is implementing sweeping new data privacy laws that puts individuals in charge of their data. A thing the US Congress won’t do, because it will hurt business. As you can tell by their tepid response to the Equifax data breach.
Facebook knew for 2 yrs 2 Million folks information had been stolen. If they can’t fix it, shut it down till they do. Zuckerberg and Sanford are ONLY about their profits…they didnt give a damn Cambridge stole our information. Sanford said, “oh they told us they deleted all the info”, but they didn’t and Facebook attornies didnt demand proof. If the whistleblower had not blown the whistle…we still wouldn’t know. Sorry, this is a huge issue and they can’t just walk away. They wanted to make us pay to get off?