Today Facebook creator and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front a senate committee to defend his company in the recent short coming with user information being stolen as well as a multitude of other issues along the way. During the hearing Zuckerberg defended his company after the info theft by Cambridge analytica in which more than 87 Million user’s personal info was taken without their knowledge and later sold to other companies.
Senators in the hearing fired questions at Zuckerberg about when his company knew about the issue, how quickly they dealt with the issue and if they shut down Cambridge analytica’s pages. They also questioned him on issues revolving around Russian collusion on Facebook during different elections around the world. Zuckerberg admitted that of the 87 Million users affected none were notified of the situation and Facebook never informed the FTC of the situation stating that after they personally dealt with Cambridge analytica they took them at their word that none of the info would be or had been used and felt that the matter was closed.
Zuckerberg stated that you “Can’t start a company in your dorm room to the size as it is today without mistakes.” And they (Facebook) have used those mistakes to better the site by making suck moves as Hiring 20+ Thousand employees for security checks as well as advancing their A.I. system to combat such things as hate speech and terrorism recruitment and planning. Also, the question was raised from comments made by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg that site users may have to pay a fee if that want additional protection for their personal information. Zuckerberg still states that “it is our mission to connect everyone around the for free.” when asked by senators “how do you do that.” He responded, “senator we run adds.” The same adds that they collect personal and private information to customize to the individual.
I feel the question we all must ask ourselves at this point is do we trust Facebook? If not, where do we turn to for the same type of service? As pointed in the hearing it appears that Facebook does have a form of monopoly with all the services that they offer. The multitude of things that the Facebook platforms allows you to do would require multiple other apps and sites to do it all. Is it time for a new company to come in and give Facebook some real competition? Or do we look back to groups like Myspace to restructure their site and give users another comparable option to choose from? It’s time for us as users to make these decisions and push for the changes we want.
Never stop asking
D.R. Shafer
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