Why Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is winning the US Senate hearings

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.

Read More on  → Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Facebook Scandal: It was my mistake and am sorry, Mark Zuckerberg tells US Senate

Zuckerberg traversed Capitol Hill on Monday surrounded by police and trailed by packs of reporters ahead of his scheduled appearance before three congressional committees.

International; News : Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg placed the blame for privacy and security lapses at the world’s largest social network squarely on himself as he girded on Monday (Apr 9) for appearances this week on Capitol Hill before angry lawmakers.

In prepared remarks released by a congressional panel, Zuckerberg admitted he was too idealistic and failed to grasp how the platform – used by 2 billion people – could be abused and manipulated.

The 33-year-old is to testify before senators on Tuesday and House lawmakers on Wednesday amid a firestorm over the hijacking of data on millions of Facebook users by the British firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked with Donald Trump’s campaign.

On Monday, Zuckerberg ditched his trademark T-shirt for a suit and tie as he made the rounds on Capitol Hill with his wife Priscilla for private meetings with lawmakers ahead of the hearings – a key test for the Facebook founder.

“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry,” Zuckerberg said in his written testimony released by the House commerce committee.

“I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.”

In his written remarks, Mark Zuckerberg called Facebook “an idealistic and optimistic company” and said: “We focused on all the good that connecting people can bring.”

But he acknowledged that “it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.”

Zuckerberg said he has called for more investments in security that will “significantly impact our profitability going forward,” adding: “I want to be clear about what our priority is: protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profit.”

Facebook data breach giving you panic attacks? Here are some desi options

Amid data breach talks and the recent instance of Cambridge Analytica scandal, where unauthorised access to user data apparently caused election meddling, there have been calls to delete Facebook.

Business News : After the scandal broke, there has been a growing scepticism around safety of personal data on social media. There was a frenzy among netizens to delete their social media account in order to protect their personal information.

The safety of your personal information cannot be guaranteed, but if you are looking for some ‘desi’ alternatives to Facebook, here is a list:

Hike

Hike Messenger is a cross-platform instant messaging service that provides users with a platform for text messaging, sending each other graphical stickers, emoticons, images, videos, audios, documents, voice messages, contacts and users’ location. The app can also be used to book Ola vehicles directly and has also enabled Hike ID, through which users can chat with each other without sharing their mobile numbers.

Roposo

Roposo is an app that offers filters and editing tools, and an option for social media sharing that allows users to instantly publish pictures on other social media channels.

The camera in the app helps edit and stitch videos to perfection; reducing the editing time. And users get to edit the videos on their phone itself. With the introduction of augmented reality feature on the app, users can create better content and post it on the platform.

Sharechat

Backed by SAIF Partners and Xiaomi, Sharechat is a leading social networking platform in India which enables users to watch and share videos on other platforms as well. Available in 14 vernacular languages, Sharechat is meant for all the users who love to share videos and photos in their own regional language.

SyncYu

SyncYu is an Indian pro-social networking application which focuses on connecting with friends and family by providing a spam-free platform. It is advertisement-free and claims to show how its users truly are to the world. This app comes with a lot of features like messaging, games, shoutouts, wordsmash, news and much more.

Mooshak

An attempt to make Hindi and Devnagiri relevant for the Next Gen, this app enables users to post content in Hindi. For the users who are not quite good at writing in the language, the app helps to translate your content into Hindi. Simply upload images, videos and audios and share it with people around the globe.

For the unversed, Cambridge Analytica, the political data firm with ties to United States President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, is under fire for allegedly gaining access to private information of more than 50 million Facebook users, and influencing elections by using this stolen data.

Full Updates on  → Facebook Data Breach

Cambridge Analytica Scandal: How India can save democracy from Facebook

Hegemonic incumbents like Google and Facebook need to be tackled with regulation; govt should use procurement power to fund open source alternatives.

Cambridge Analytica Scandal : Those that celebrate the big data/artificial intelligence moment claim that traditional approaches to data protection are no longer relevant and therefore must be abandoned. The Cambridge Analytica episode, if anything, demonstrates how wrong they are. The principles of data protection need to be reinvented and weaponized, not discarded. In this article I shall discuss the reinvention of three such data protection principles. Apart from this I shall also briefly explore competition law solutions.

Collect data only if mandated by regulation

• One, data minimization is the principle that requires the data controller to collect data only if mandated to do so by regulation or because it is a prerequisite for providing a functionality. For example, Facebook’s messenger app on Android harvests call records and meta-data, without any consumer facing feature on the app that justifies such collection. Therefore, this is a clear violation of the data minimization principle. One of the ways to reinvent this principle is by borrowing from the best practices around warnings and labels on packaging introduced by the global anti-tobacco campaign. A permanent bar could be required in all apps, stating ‘Facebook holds W number of records across X databases over the time period Y, which totals Z Gb’. Each of these alphabets could be a hyperlink, allowing the user to easily drill down to the individual data record.

Consent must be explicit, informed and voluntary

• Two, the principle of consent requires that the data controller secure explicit, informed and voluntary consent from the data subject unless there are exceptional circumstances. Unfortunately, consent has been reduced to a mockery today through obfuscation by lawyers in verbose “privacy notices” and “terms of services”. To reinvent consent we need to bring ‘Do Not Dial’ registries into the era of big data. A website maintained by the future Indian data protection regulator could allow individuals to check against their unique identifiers (email, phone number, Aadhaar). The website would provide a list of all data controllers that are holding personal information against a particular unique identifier. The data subject should then be able to revoke consent with one-click. Once consent is revoked, the data controller would have to delete all personal information that they hold, unless retention of such information is required under law (for example, in banking law). One-click revocation of consent will make data controllers like Facebook treat data subjects with greater respect.

→ Cambridge Analytica Row ←

Cambridge Analytica Row: Who used stolen data for polls – Congress or BJP?

Ravi Shankar Prasad said, ‘The Congress must explain if it has engaged in data trade with Cambridge Analytica’.

Latest News : The BJP and the Congress accused each other of using the services of embattled data consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) that along with Facebook is at the centre of a global row over the alleged unauthorized use of personal data from the social media giant.

As the firestorm over the issue hit India, the government warned Facebook, which is being probed by US and British lawmakers over a potential breach of user confidentiality, of stringent action if any attempt was made to influence the country’s electoral process through “undesirable means”.

However, the company’s India partner Oveleno Business Intelligence (OBI) lists the BJP, the Congress and the JD-U as its clients. The India partner is by Amrish Tyagi, son of senior JD-U leader K. C. Tyagi. In media interviews, the junior Tyagi admitted that the Youth Congress in Jharkhand, the BJP and the JD-U had used its services to conduct research.

BJP leader and Union Law and IT and Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad cited media reports to allege that the Congress was using the services of the London-based political data analytics firm for the next Lok Sabha election and boost its president Rahul Gandhi’s social media profile and its outreach.

“The Congress must explain if it has engaged in data trade with Cambridge Analytica,” the minister said.

He said the number of Gandhi’s followers on Twitter had risen recently and wondered if the Congress had used the services of the Cambridge Analytica for this “fake popularity”.

“Will the Congress now depend on data manipulation and theft to woo voters,” Prasad asked.

“These days, there is a lot of news about CA and how it has been involved in data theft, psychometric analysis, data manipulation and subversion of democratic processes. Can the Congress deny that?” he asked.

→ Cambridge Analytica , Cambridge Analytica Row ←