BRACE FOR PRIVACY BILL OF RIGHTS, ZUCKERBERG!
Mark Zuckerberg’s desperate tour to limit damage to Facebook from its massive Cambridge Analytica scandal heads to Congress next week amid growing calls to regulate the social network and a Bay State senator’s demands for a “privacy bill of rights.”
Sen. Edward J. Markey, who will question Zuckerberg when he appears Tuesday at a high-stakes hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees, said it’s time for Congress to guarantee Americans the right to online privacy.
“The Facebook data spill has created a day of reckoning for the online industry,” Markey told the Herald. “It’s time now for us to put a national privacy bill of rights on the books that all Americans can rely upon.”
Markey said he wants to know how the Cambridge Analytica data mining happened under Facebook’s watch, what concrete changes Facebook is making, what recourse there will be for victims of the privacy invasions, and whether Facebook fostered a culture that tolerated privacy malpractice.
The hearing is “going to give us an opportunity to give the American people a clearer picture of how their private data malpractice took place and how Facebook is going to make it right,” Markey said.
Zuckerberg, in an hourlong conference call with reporters this week, refined the type of contrite tone he’ll need to survive two days of being flayed by lawmakers.
“It’s clear now that we didn’t do enough,” Zuckerberg said. “We didn’t take a broad enough view of what our responsibility is, and that was a huge mistake. It was my mistake.”
Zuckerberg said Facebook is adding 5,000 people to its existing 15,000-member staff working on security ahead of the 2018 midterm elections in the U.S. and other presidential elections in India, Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan and Hungary.
“This is going to be a never-ending battle,” Zuckerberg said. “You never fully solve security — it’s an arms race. In retrospect we were behind, and we didn’t invest enough in it up front.”
The two committees Zuckerberg will appear before next week were rich beneficiaries of the social media giant in the 2016 elections.
In all, committee members raked in $334,555 in campaign contributions from Facebook and its affiliates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
That said, lawmakers from both parties next week are expected to join in battering Zuckerberg like “a pinata” — especially given the company’s confirmation yesterday that data from as many as 87 million users were compromised in the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the admission that most of Facebook’s 2.2 billion users had information scraped from their profiles by “malicious actors” who abused the social network’s features.
Republican political strategist Ford O’Connell said, “Congress, they love to use whoever they are cross-examining as a pinata.”
But even though Democrats and Republicans will likely find common ground targeting the Facebook exec, lawmakers from both parties will have a tougher time agreeing on how to regulate the internet giant. “The chance of Republicans and Democrats coming together on a solution? You have better chance of finding a flea at a flea market,” O’Connell said. “Their understandings of regulations is an ocean apart.”
That opening could give the Harvard dropout the room he needs to suggest a particular vision of online privacy protections that the company could swallow. Zuckerberg already this week said he’d expand protections legally mandated by the European Union to all users. “If he’s smart, he will put something on the table to try to assuage the outrage that is coming from both Republicans and Democrats,” Democratic strategist Jim Manley said. “The intensity is white-hot right now. If they put their head in the sand, they are going to get nailed.”