So last week Mark Zuckerberg testified before the Congress Commerce Committee and I watched most of it. For those of you who have just returned from the planet Neptune and have not heard why this is happening, Facebook was being accused of violating a breach of trust. This was because one App developer (of which there are many) named Alexander Kogan took information that he wasn’t supposed to and sold it to Cambridge Analytica, which may or may not have used that user data to mess around with the 2106 Presidential election. If I’m honest, after hearing what was going on from the man in charge himself, I’m not convinced that there was any wrongdoing on the part of Facebook. As I see it An App developer doing wrong on a platform and then the platform then banned him for what he did.
From the bits that I saw, I drew a couple of interesting conclusions;
1) The Congress people had their own agendas – I found it surprising that some of the Congresspeople (and I have to point out, it was certainly not all of them) were there, or seemed to be there simply to push their own agendas. There were (from the Day 2 coverage that I saw) two difference congresspeople who nearly demanded that Mr. Zuckerberg support legislation that happened to be Internet associated. Here’s the thing, He was justifiably unwilling to support legislation he hadn’t read.This is something that any common person, to say nothing of the CEO of the largest social media platform in the world, would do. The Congresspeople who were asking for his support wanted a blanket yes or no for his support. Zuckerberg brilliantly was able to avoid saying yes or no.
2) Mark Zuckerberg is a Startlingly brilliant man – This should not come as much of a surprise that Mr. Zuckerberg is bright. While attending Harvard (as we all know) he started a Social Media platform which he has been able to grow to the largest platform in the world. This is not something that any average person could have done. This, for me, was something that was visualized by the view that I saw of the trial. Go ahead and look at the header image of this post, I took a screen capture to get it. On the right, you can see the many congresspeople who are in the middle of the testimony. They have pads of paper and notes that they are likely going to reference and questions from the people in their constituency. It’s understandable that they have their notes in front of them, they want to be able to remember what they want to say and ask about this complex subject. Now look at the left….Mark Zuckerberg has a small pad of paper and that’s it. He has all of his information in his head!
3) Facebook didn’t do anything wrong – Yup, I’m saying it. Facebook didn’t do anything wrong. I’m going to bring up the point that Mr. Zuckerberg said (over and over and over again) is that the App Developer took users personal information and sold it to Cambridge Analytica when they weren’t supposed to. This person tried to exploit Facebook for his own personal gains and got caught. The fact that he was doing it with Facebooks users is not the point. It’s the fact that he was doing it at all. If this had happened on Twitter people would be reacting the same way.
4) The people questioning him were unprepared for the topic – I’m sure you’ve seen one of the many you-tube videos mocking the senators about what they were saying (and the ridiculous questions they were asking) but the truth of the matter is that there were many who were simply not prepared to question Mr. Zuckerberg on the subject matter that he knew so well. I can understand wanting answers and get to the heart of a matter but some of the asinine questions being asked didn’t make any sense. An example of this was “if I send a message on WhatsApp about Black Panther (topical, I’ll give him that) will I see marketing about Black Panther on my Facebook feed?” Mr. Zuckerberg said no because the two systems are different and encrypted. But then the question was asked again! I’m not saying phrased differently to elicit a different response, I mean the EXACT SAME QUESTION. It was like being a martial artist and watching a Kung Fu movie knowing that all the moves were wrong.
The Zuckerberg testimony was ALL over the news last week, and the fact that there was a breach of information is a very concerning situation. This has been the one thing that got to everyone, so now everyone is concerned about their privacy. While they should be, there is an underlying message that should be pointed out. One of the things that Mr. Zuckerberg pointed out quite a few times was that there are quite a few different ways that Facebook asks you about data collection, and whether or not you want to have your data collected when you sign up. If you’ve had a Facebook account for a while I would recommend going into your settings and check your security settings. Sometimes things change in order to update security, sometimes when those changes occur the security settings get reset. It’s the responsibility of Facebook to provide users with the ability to protect their information. It’s up to the User to take it. It’s up to us to do as much as we can to protect our own data.
Did you happen to see the hearings?
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