The social-media giant’s economic model emerged unscathed despite hours of questions from senators.
International News : Mark Zuckerberg did just fine in his first turn in the Congressional hot seat. He was confident. He capably tackled many of the queries proposed last week by Bloomberg columnists. The 33-year-old billionaire appeared humble throughout much of the hearing, with only a few smug smiles.
The best news for Facebook Inc. the company was that Zuckerberg ably deflected any challenges to the beating heart of its economic model: its hungry data collection and the fine-tuned targeted advertising based on that data. Zuckerberg’s success is a win for anyone primarily concerned with the company’s market value. But it’s a loss for the rest of us.
Facebook will keep failing users’ trust as long as its business is based on unrestrained hoovering of as much user data as possible, and crafting ever-more innovative ways for advertisers to harness that information for commercial goals. It’s an arrangement to which Facebook’s users agree and can sidestep, technically, but it is hardly informed consent or a real option to avoid.
This inherent conflict was on display during two of Mark Zuckerberg‘s exchanges on Tuesday. The first was with Senator Roy Blunt, the Republican from Missouri. He asked Zuckerberg a series of questions about what information the company can collect on its 2 billion users and use for advertising, including whether the social network can pinpoint that a person who posts on Facebook from his work computer in the morning is the same person who uploads a photo to his Facebook smartphone app at night.
The answer, as Zuckerberg surely knows, is yes. Facebook brags to advertisers that it can provide “cross-device” targeting, as it is called. The company can also track people nearly everywhere they go online, and it can see what apps people have installed on their phones.
Facebook also collects information on “offline” activity, as Blunt also asked, which includes information on users’ location as they roam around the real world. Companies can also match their information on what your purchase in stores — that box of cereal at the supermarket, for example — and marry it with Facebook account information. Inexplicably, Zuckerberg tried to say he wasn’t completely sure about Facebook’s data collection policies, and one of his underlings could follow up later. The Facebook CEO knows what his company does, but perhaps he couldn’t acknowledge that his companies relies on assembling detailed dossiers on billions of people.
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