Hi, folks. It's Shira. The most troubling takeaway from two days of congressional hearings on Facebook Inc. was this: Mark Zuckerberg didn't want to explain how the company's business model worked.
Zuckerberg mostly ducked questions about what types of information Facebook collects, and how the company uses the data for advertising.
He found it hard to plainly acknowledge that Facebook tracks users from device to device, collects information on websites people visit and apps they use, gathers information on people's physical locations, collects phone call logs from Android smartphones, and pulls in some data about people who don't have Facebook accounts at all.
Zuckerberg declined to acknowledge that Facebook's ad system and products are informed by all this information gathering on and off of the social network. If Facebook were a true bargain -- we get a useful, free service in exchange for seeing ads based on our interests and activity -- then Zuckerberg should be comfortable explaining how all this works.
Instead, given the option to articulate Facebook's relationship with users (and non-users), he dodged. A lot.
He said he couldn't answer queries from Senator Roy Blunt, who asked on Tuesday whether Facebook tracks users across their computing devices or tracks offline activity. The answer to both is yes. During the hearing on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said he didn't know what "shadow profiles" are, even though this term has been used for a while to describe Facebook's collection of data about people who don't use its services by harvesting the inboxes and smartphone contacts of active Facebook users. (Zuckerberg acknowledged that the company gathers information on people who aren't signed up for Facebook for "security purposes.")
Zuckerberg had to correct the record on Wednesday after he initially said -- incorrectly -- that Facebook's feature to download a user's entire data dossier has all the information Facebook has collected, including web browsing history. Representative Joe Kennedy pressed the CEO on whether people truly understand that Facebook targets ads based on a whole host of data, and inferences it makes about our interests, not just the information we post on the social network or pages we "like." Zuckerberg didn't directly answer. To his credit, he did say more than once that few users chose to opt out of Facebook's data collection or its targeted advertising.
If Zuckerberg and Facebook were comfortable with the data-based bedrock of their business, the CEO should be able and willing to explain all the ways his company collects data on us, and how it makes use of it all. It felt like Facebook made a calculated decision to deflect rather than talk openly. And to me, that's a sign Facebook is embarrassed about what it does for a living. --
Shira Ovide
