Facebook stops funding campaign against U.S. consumers’ privacy

April 14 07:41 2018

Zuckerberg took part in two hearings Tuesday afternoon to pass along as much information regarding the interaction between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica as possible. How can we measure data’s worth?

The closest the Facebook CEO came to addressing the issue was when he acknowledged to Rep. Kathy Castor that Facebook collects data from users even when they’re not on Facebook and not even logged in to the platform.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, after facing 10 hours of hard-hitting questions from the Congress, has finally made a comeback. Stressing that there is an online propaganda “arms race” with Russian Federation and it was important to make sure no one interferes in any more elections including in India, Zuckerberg told Congress that his own personal data was “improperly shared”.

The 33-year-old founder of the world’s best-known social media giant is set for another Capitol Hill grilling on Wednesday before members of the House. “And more than 70 million small businesses now use Facebook to grow and create jobs”. Jefferies said in an April research note that the firm “analyzed Facebook’s traffic over the course of March and believe that recent headlines around Facebook’s data policies have not meaningfully impacted engagement on the platform”. It moved even higher when he started addressing the questions from lawmakers and finished the day with a 4.5 percent gain.

And Facebook makes money – gobs of money – from our willingness to share ourselves online in a way that we could not imagine doing in flesh-and-blood interactions with others.

Facebook’s irresponsibility isn’t merely an abuse of a personal relationship – what its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, called “a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us” – but also an abuse of a civic relationship.

“It’s not enough to just connect people. What is clear, however, is that the size Facebook has reached makes this a global issue, not just a USA issue”.

All we can do now is be smarter about how the products we use have become so integrated into our lives. “All along they said they don’t sell personal information so it didn’t make sense why they would fight this”. He said the Russian campaign of disinformation had been discovered “right around the time” of the U.S. presidential election, and said the company had developed “new AI tools” to identify fake accounts responsible.

While some of the questions were clearly too specific for Zuckerberg to answer without referring to some sort of written documents, many of his “follow up” promises were nothing more than his lawyer-coached way of saying no or refusing to answer a question.

Asked if his employees had been interviewed, he again responded yes but added: “I have not”, CNN reported. “I should reasonably expect that that’s going to work as it is presented to me”.

Laidlaw said while she doesn’t agree with most of Zuckerberg’s statements during the hearing so far, she agrees with him on this.

Regulation is certainly one way to catch up on protecting people’s data privacy, according to Emily Laidlaw, an associate professor of law at the University of Calgary.

Leah Millis  REUTERS

Facebook stops funding campaign against U.S. consumers’ privacy
 
 
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