Facebook CEO grilled today on data mining
WASHINGTON — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faces a reckoning today, the first of two days of grilling by lawmakers on Capitol Hill over how users’ data was sold without their knowledge and whether the breach violated a consent decree that could mean trillions of dollars in fines.
Zuckerberg will apologize and accept responsibility for the illicit data mining as well as for not responding quickly enough to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, which included the use of the social media platform.
“I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here,” Zuckerberg will tell lawmakers today, according to prepared opening remarks released by lawmakers.
Aides to lawmakers on the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees — who Zuckerberg will face today in a rare joint hearing — say members will focus on whether political research firm Cambridge Analytica’s mining of billions of Facebook users’ data without their consent violates a 2011 consent decree between Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission.
Violation of that order, the result of another probe of Facebook’s privacy practices, could yield a 13-figure financial penalty based on the number of users affected — though the FTC has never levied such a hefty fine in such a case before.
Lawmakers’ questioning today will not only get to whether the Cambridge Analytica breach, as well as subsequent revelations of other illicit use of user data by other companies, violated the FTC order, they’ll also focus on what action Facebook took to address the problem as well as whether Congress should step in to rein in the company.
Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, the top Democrat on the Commerce Committee who met with Zuckerberg yesterday, said, “There is going to be a hard look at regulation.”
Today Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a member of the Commerce Committee, will introduce a bill that would require any entity accessing Facebook data to require users to “opt-in” and consent before that information can be used, shared or sold. It would also require that users be notified about how the information has been used.
But the fallout continues from Facebook’s practices, including the third-party use of quizzes and other platforms to gain user data without consent, and tracking of people on the web who don’t use Facebook in order to market online ads to them.
Yesterday Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak announced he was shuttering his own Facebook account based on the company’s privacy protection problems, telling USA Today that Facebook’s “profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back.”