Joe K III slams breach of trust
Zuckerberg grilled for second day
WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Joseph Kennedy III pressed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg yesterday on data-collection practices he says breached users’ trust, and for failing to address the greater societal concerns raised by the social media giant’s practices.
“One of the challenges with trust here is there is an awful lot of information that is generated that people don’t think they are generating, and that advertisers are being able to target because Facebook collects it,” Kennedy told Zuckerberg, who faced lawmakers on Capitol Hill for a second straight day yesterday.
Zuckerberg pushed back, saying that the social media platform does not disseminate non-public user data to advertisers, but rather uses such information internally to target ads to Facebook users based on the users’ activity.
“Facebook does the work to rank and target which ads are going to what people” by using metadata and other information based on users’ preferences and likes and communications, Zuckerberg said.
“Then I don’t understand how users then own that data,” Kennedy said, referring to Zuckerberg’s statement that users control their own data and how it is shared.
“You haven’t talked about the societal implication of it,” the Brookline Democrat added. “While I applaud some of the reforms that you are putting forward, the underlying issue here is your platform has become a mix of news, entertainment, social media that is up for manipulation — we’ve seen that with a foreign actor.”
Zuckerberg told lawmakers yesterday that his own personal information was among that collected and sold by data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica, and that the company this week began notifying the other 87 million users whose data was captured.
Yesterday, Cambridge Analytica acting CEO Alexander Tayler stepped down, having taken over only after CEO Alexander Nix was suspended last month over the data-mining scandal. A lawmaker delivered that news to Zuckerberg as he sat through hours of questioning by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Zuckerberg also was grilled about whether the social media platform was politically biased against Republicans, whether it failed to adequately address claims of racial bias and whether he would support any of a number of bills-being proposed to rein in the company’s privacy protection practices.
Although Zuckerberg stopped short of embracing specific legislation, he said regulation of the social media industry is “inevitable.” But he warned that legislation that is too broad would stifle competition from startups.