Google on grill
CEO on Congress’ hot seat over privacy
Lawmakers on Tuesday tried to get assurances from Google’s CEO that the tech giant isn’t tracking their every move.
“I have an iPhone,” said Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas), holding it up at the House Judiciary Committee hearing.
“Does Google, through this phone, know that I have moved?”
“Not by default,” responded CEO Sundar Pichai, in his first testimony on Capitol Hill.
He said so-called location services wasn’t the default iPhone setting, but users may add it to Google services by downloading an app.
Also, answering conservatives’ concerns that the Internet behemoth is manipulating search results to favor liberal causes, Pichai insisted his company is politically neutral and that employees couldn’t manipulate results even if they wanted to.
“I lead this company without political bias and work to ensure that our products continue to operate that way,” he told the committee.
“It’s not possible for an individual employee or groups of employees to manipulate the search results. We have a robust framework including many steps in the process.”
Republican lawmakers were not convinced.
“I disagree,” shot back Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas). “I think humans can manipulate the process.”
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) went a step further, charged that the company itself is actively slanting search results.
“There’s a very strong conviction on this side of the aisle that the algorithms are written with a bias against conservatives,” he said.
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) accused Pichai of being blind to the problems.
“You are so surrounded by liberality that hates conservatism, that hates people that really love our Constitution and the freedoms it’s afforded people like you, that you don’t even recog- nize it,” he said.
Until now, Pichai had avoided the public congressional grilling that the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter have experienced.
Democrats panned the GOP’s allegations of Google bias and argued the pressing issue is whether foreign powers, like Russia, are using Google to spread false information.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) dismissed the “right-wing conspiracy theories” and “fantasy.”
And even if Google did discriminate against conservative viewpoints, Nadler added, that would be its right as a private company, “just as Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting discriminate against progressive ones.”