facebook in the hot seat
Sen. John Kennedy 'gently' tells Mark Zuckerberg Facebook's 'user agreement sucks'
During his grilling in front of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees on Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg fielded questions on everything from when the company first discussed telling users about Cambridge Analytica's misuse of data to whether Facebook uses smartphone microphones to spy on people, but there was also some levity, courtesy of Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.)
He started his remarks by telling Zuckerberg, "I don't want to vote to have to regulate Facebook, but by God I will, and a lot of that depends on you." Kennedy said he didn't feel like Zuckerberg was "connecting" with the senators, and then got blunt. "Here's what everybody has been trying to tell you today and I say this gently: Your user agreement sucks," he said. "The purpose of that user agreement is to cover Facebook's rear end. It's not to inform your users about their rights."
There are "impurities in the Facebook punchbowl and they've got to be fixed," Kennedy added, before asking Zuckerberg his final question: Does Facebook have the right to share with someone Kennedy's data, with his name attached to it? "Technically," this is possible, Zuckerberg replied, since the data is in Facebook's system, "but it would be a massive breach and so we would not do that." Catherine Garcia