Senators promote measure aimed at protecting privacy on Facebook
WASHINGTON – Senators introduced a bipartisan bill Thursday that would give Americans greater power to protect their online privacy.
The day before, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress about the misuse of user data on the social media site.
“The data breach at Facebook showed the world that the digital promised land is not all milk and honey,” said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who co-sponsored the bill with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. “I don’t want to regulate Facebook half to death, but there are things that need to be changed.”
The bill by the two Senate Judiciary Committee members would give consumers the ability to disable data tracking and collection on Internet sites. It would require Facebook and other online companies to notify users within 72 hours of any data breach and offer remedies to limit the damage.
Zuckerberg was pressed repeatedly by lawmakers this week about why he didn’t inform users and Federal Trade Commission regulators in 2015 that a Cambridge University researcher used an app to collect personal information on about 87 million Facebook users in the USA and share it with the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. The firm worked for the Donald Trump campaign.
“In retrospect, it was a mistake,” Zuckerberg told the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday. “We should have, and I wish we had, notified and told people then. ... I think that it was the right thing to have done.”
The Kennedy-Klobuchar bill would give consumers the ability to see what personal information had been collected and shared with advertisers or other outside groups. It would require companies to provide their terms-of-service agreements in plain English that could be easily understood.
Klobuchar said Facebook and other online companies must be required to do more to protect Americans’ sensitive information.
“Social media and other online companies are profiting off the data of Americans — their online behavior, personal messages, contact and personal information and more — all while leaving consumers in the dark,” she said.
Klobuchar is the co-sponsor of the bipartisan Honest Ads Act, which would require social media companies to publicly disclose who pays for political ads on their platforms.
Zuckerberg expressed support for that bill last week. He disclosed last year that Facebook identified more than $100,000 worth of political ads purchased by a Russian company linked to the Kremlin.