thelittlemoments
Mark Zuckerberg Testimony: A Critical Test for Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg met with senators on Monday at the Capitol. Credit Pete Marovich for The New York Times
Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, will make his much-anticipated appearance before members of Congress starting Tuesday afternoon. In two days of hearings, he will face tough questions on how and why the company failed to protect the delicate data of many millions of its users.
This is Mr. Zuckerberg’s first appearance before Congress and his performance will be critical to the company’s future. His responses about the company’s ability to protect its users will be closely scrutinized by lawmakers and regulators as well as competitors, Facebook employees and the billions of people who use the platform across the globe.
To help make the case that he should be taken seriously as a businessman and a statesman, Mr. Zuckerberg will be taking oath in a suit instead of his trademark gray T-shirt and jeans.
The hearings were prompted by the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign, harvested data of an estimated 87 million Facebook users to psychologically profile voters. On Tuesday, the company announced it would begin offering a “data abuse bounty” program to reward people who report incidents of similar abuse.
But expect the hearings to expand far beyond the Cambridge matter. Senate and House lawmakers will take the opportunity to grill Mr. Zuckerberg, the 33-year-old iconic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, on the proliferation of so-called fake news on Facebook and on Russian interference on the platform during the 2016 presidential election.
Regulation and legal action could loom for the company. The joint Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees will hold their hearing shortly after the start of 2:15 p.m. floor vote on Tuesday. Mr. Zuckerberg will appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee at 10 a.m. Wednesday.
Expect a long afternoon: 44 senators will participate in the hearing and have been promised four minutes each of questioning.
Zuckerberg Welcomed by Dozens of Zuckerbergs on the Hill
Greeting Mr. Zuckerberg on Tuesday are dozens of cardboard cutouts of his own image wearing “fix fakebook.” in front of the U.S. Capitol Building. Credit Lawrence Jackson for The New York Times
Facebook Warns Private Messages Might Have Been Harvested
This morning, many people woke up to a Facebook notification that their personal information had been collected by “This Is Your Digital Life,” a quiz app developed by a University of Cambridge researcher, which harvested the data that was ultimately passed to Cambridge Analytica. According to the notification, the app collected data including users’ public profile information, page likes, birthdays, and current cities.
But Facebook’s notifications also alerted people that their messages were possible accessed during the breach. Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American academic who contracted with Cambridge Analytica’s British affiliate to harvest and provide private Facebook data, told The New York Times that the app harvested messages from the people who took part in the quiz directly, but not their extended friend network. Mr. Kogan added that the messages were not transferred to Cambridge Analytica.
Mr. Kogan said that the private messages were harvested as part of research that was conducted at Cambridge University in 2013 and the first half of 2014, before he began working with Cambridge Analytica.
The messages were collected for research into how people use emojis to convey emotions. They were kept securely in his university lab, known as the Cambridge Pro-Sociality and Well Being Lab, and access was restricted to a small group of people, Mr. Kogan said.
The message data “was obviously sensitive so we tried to be careful about how could access it,” Mr. Kogan said.
He stressed that his Facebook app only harvested messages from a “couple thousand” people who completed his questionnaire, not from their friends, he said.
During Mr. Kogan’s later work for Cambridge Analytica, his Facebook app would harvest data from people who took his questionnaire and from all their friends. But the data did not include private messages — it included only names, birth dates, locations and pages the users had liked, he said.
— Kevin Roose, Matthew Rosenberg and Sheera Frenkel
A Hot-Ticket Hearing
Several hours before Mr. Zuckerberg is scheduled to begin testifying, the line of people trying to get into the hearing room already stretched far down the hallway.
Annamarie Rienzi, a student at American University, was one of the first people in line. Wearing a T-shirt that read” #deletefacebook,” Ms. Rienzi said that she had come to the hearing to express her displeasure with the social network. She hadn’t actually deleted her Facebook account yet, she said, but was waiting to see how Mr. Zuckerberg performed before deciding whether or not to continue using the service.
“It’s really going to rest on this hearing,” she said. “It’s going to come down to if he’s honest, and if he learned from hiding so much information in the past.”
In Zuckerberg We Trust?
Facebook’s repeated privacy mishaps — and subsequent apologies — will be a recurring theme during the hearings.
Mr. Zuckerberg will start out with another mea culpa and plans to tell lawmakers that the company made a “big mistake” in underestimating its responsibility, according to prepared testimony released by the Energy and Commerce Committee. “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it and I’m responsible for what happens here.”
Mr. Zuckerberg is also expected to say the company is hiring thousands of people to make the site more secure and to correct mishaps over privacy and fake news. But the question of trust is at the center of the company’s ability to thrive going forward. Some lawmakers will insist that the company’s business model of collecting data to target ads is fundamentally at odds with the protection of its users’ privacy.
— Cecilia Kang
Click Next To Continue Reading
via The Little Moment ift.tt/2EB4bdZ
Mark Zuckerberg Testimony: A Critical Test for Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg met with senators on Monday at the Capitol. Credit Pete Marovich for The New York Times
Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, will make his much-anticipated appearance before members of Congress starting Tuesday afternoon. In two days of hearings, he will face tough questions on how and why the company failed to protect the delicate data of many millions of its users.
This is Mr. Zuckerberg’s first appearance before Congress and his performance will be critical to the company’s future. His responses about the company’s ability to protect its users will be closely scrutinized by lawmakers and regulators as well as competitors, Facebook employees and the billions of people who use the platform across the globe.
To help make the case that he should be taken seriously as a businessman and a statesman, Mr. Zuckerberg will be taking oath in a suit instead of his trademark gray T-shirt and jeans.
The hearings were prompted by the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign, harvested data of an estimated 87 million Facebook users to psychologically profile voters. On Tuesday, the company announced it would begin offering a “data abuse bounty” program to reward people who report incidents of similar abuse.
But expect the hearings to expand far beyond the Cambridge matter. Senate and House lawmakers will take the opportunity to grill Mr. Zuckerberg, the 33-year-old iconic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, on the proliferation of so-called fake news on Facebook and on Russian interference on the platform during the 2016 presidential election.
Regulation and legal action could loom for the company. The joint Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees will hold their hearing shortly after the start of 2:15 p.m. floor vote on Tuesday. Mr. Zuckerberg will appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee at 10 a.m. Wednesday.
Expect a long afternoon: 44 senators will participate in the hearing and have been promised four minutes each of questioning.
Zuckerberg Welcomed by Dozens of Zuckerbergs on the Hill
Greeting Mr. Zuckerberg on Tuesday are dozens of cardboard cutouts of his own image wearing “fix fakebook.” in front of the U.S. Capitol Building. Credit Lawrence Jackson for The New York Times
Facebook Warns Private Messages Might Have Been Harvested
This morning, many people woke up to a Facebook notification that their personal information had been collected by “This Is Your Digital Life,” a quiz app developed by a University of Cambridge researcher, which harvested the data that was ultimately passed to Cambridge Analytica. According to the notification, the app collected data including users’ public profile information, page likes, birthdays, and current cities.
But Facebook’s notifications also alerted people that their messages were possible accessed during the breach. Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American academic who contracted with Cambridge Analytica’s British affiliate to harvest and provide private Facebook data, told The New York Times that the app harvested messages from the people who took part in the quiz directly, but not their extended friend network. Mr. Kogan added that the messages were not transferred to Cambridge Analytica.
Mr. Kogan said that the private messages were harvested as part of research that was conducted at Cambridge University in 2013 and the first half of 2014, before he began working with Cambridge Analytica.
The messages were collected for research into how people use emojis to convey emotions. They were kept securely in his university lab, known as the Cambridge Pro-Sociality and Well Being Lab, and access was restricted to a small group of people, Mr. Kogan said.
The message data “was obviously sensitive so we tried to be careful about how could access it,” Mr. Kogan said.
He stressed that his Facebook app only harvested messages from a “couple thousand” people who completed his questionnaire, not from their friends, he said.
During Mr. Kogan’s later work for Cambridge Analytica, his Facebook app would harvest data from people who took his questionnaire and from all their friends. But the data did not include private messages — it included only names, birth dates, locations and pages the users had liked, he said.
— Kevin Roose, Matthew Rosenberg and Sheera Frenkel
A Hot-Ticket Hearing
Several hours before Mr. Zuckerberg is scheduled to begin testifying, the line of people trying to get into the hearing room already stretched far down the hallway.
Annamarie Rienzi, a student at American University, was one of the first people in line. Wearing a T-shirt that read” #deletefacebook,” Ms. Rienzi said that she had come to the hearing to express her displeasure with the social network. She hadn’t actually deleted her Facebook account yet, she said, but was waiting to see how Mr. Zuckerberg performed before deciding whether or not to continue using the service.
“It’s really going to rest on this hearing,” she said. “It’s going to come down to if he’s honest, and if he learned from hiding so much information in the past.”
In Zuckerberg We Trust?
Facebook’s repeated privacy mishaps — and subsequent apologies — will be a recurring theme during the hearings.
Mr. Zuckerberg will start out with another mea culpa and plans to tell lawmakers that the company made a “big mistake” in underestimating its responsibility, according to prepared testimony released by the Energy and Commerce Committee. “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it and I’m responsible for what happens here.”
Mr. Zuckerberg is also expected to say the company is hiring thousands of people to make the site more secure and to correct mishaps over privacy and fake news. But the question of trust is at the center of the company’s ability to thrive going forward. Some lawmakers will insist that the company’s business model of collecting data to target ads is fundamentally at odds with the protection of its users’ privacy.
— Cecilia Kang
Click Next To Continue Reading
via The Little Moment ift.tt/2EB4bdZ