
How tech baffled an elderly Congress - hispanic
http://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=13f67296-964c-469d-9c7f-d20a7dd550a4
======
rabidrat
> Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., attempted to ask Facebook Chief Executive Mark
> Zuckerberg a question about data privacy, and revealed a conception of
> social media resembling a wad of tangled Christmas lights: “Do you track
> devices that an individual who uses Facebook has that is connected to the
> device that they use for their Facebook connection, but not necessarily
> connected to Facebook?”

This seems like a very legitimate question. He wants to know if Facebook
tracks e.g. your FitBit. It's connected to your phone, and your phone is
connected to Facebook, but your FitBit isn't connected to Facebook. And to be
honest, I don't know the answer to that question. I would hope that they
can't, but knowing the state of the tech world (IoT: the 'S' stands for
security), it's probably possible, and knowing what we know about Facebook, if
it's possible they are probably doing it.

Not that Zuckerberg would necessarily know or confess to it before the Senate,
but that's a separate issue (I often wonder what is the point of calling a
corporate executive to DC anyway, since they have every reason to dissemble
and no reason to cooperate in good faith).

~~~
lkbm
> I often wonder what is the point of calling a corporate executive to DC
> anyway, since they have every reason to dissemble and no reason to cooperate
> in good faith

Showboating, I've always assumed. A good deal of the questioning was clearly
grandstanding, and a good number of the questions asked could have been
answered by the Senators' grandchildren.

That said, if you want to grandstand, you should first run your questions by
your grandchildren so they can tell you about online advertising and such,
lest you look like a fool on national television.

~~~
k9s9
Misguided way of looking at things imho. He is bringing more attention to the
question and a larger non-technical audience now is aware.

I have known techies voicing issues and asking questions about Facebook
practices wayback in 2008-9. You can say it took 10 years for the rest of the
population to start asking the same questions. But I see it as a failure of
the early warning technical crowd, who knew bad things were unfolding, to warn
us faster.

Whats the lesson there?

------
lkbm
> We don’t yet have comprehensive age data for the next Congress

Am I understanding this correctly? As of January 2[0], the day before the new
session began, no one had yet compiled a full list of the ages of all members
of Congress? That's baffling to me. Have an intern go look through the
Wikipedia articles for each one of them.

[0] There's no mention of the in the Baltimore Sun article, but
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/theres-so-
man...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/theres-so-many-
different-things-how-technology-baffled-an-elderly-congress-
in-2018/2019/01/02/f583f368-ffe0-11e8-83c0-b06139e540e5_story.html) is dated
2019-01-02.

~~~
whatshisface
An age-based criterion for computer knowledge would write off Donald Knuth,
while counting a tween that only knew snapchat as an expert. To be honest I'm
not sure how useful the list of ages would be.

~~~
lkbm
I've not proposed any sort of cutoff, and don't particularly care about the
specific ages. I'm just astounded by the claim that data on the ages of
members of Congress isn't readily available to a journalist at a major
newspaper.

~~~
masonic
Of course it's _available_ , given that the birthdates all are. But, to
paraphrase Barbie, "Math is hard."

I'm guessing that a quick Google of "116th Congress ages" didn't turn up a
single preformatted source in the desired format in the first few links.

~~~
lkbm
Having just spent a bit of time on this today[0], I realized there is one seat
(NC district 9) that's still not set due to fraud allegations. Could be that's
what they're referring to.

[0] Just threw this together to start playing with hosting using S3:
[http://howoldiscongress.com/](http://howoldiscongress.com/) (Yes, I know
that's absurd precision. wip and all.)

------
porphyrogene
This a good article but I would add that quoting a YouTube comment in a
serious context also shows a critical lack of understanding of what the
internet is and how its content should be regarded. The comment in question
could be posted by the author or the subject of discussion without the reader
having any way of determining or suspecting that fraud. The same cannot be
said of a direct quote. It seems like the author was parsing YouTube comments
to get an idea of what the young people who “get it” had to say and that
absurd notion stayed with me throughout the article. Unlike the author
scrolling through YouTube comments, I was questioning the quality and
genuineness of what I was reading.

Doing so later led me to ask: are Senators who know how to text each other the
most technologically knowledgeable people in Congress? Is that really good
enough to inspire hope in the author?

------
lizknope
Senators don't have to know everything just as a CEO does not know everything.
But they do have to be capable of hiring competent STAFF to help them!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_staff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_staff)

In 2000, every Representative hired 14 staff members, while the average
Senator hired 34.

In 2000, House committees had an average of 68 staff and Senate committees an
average of 46.

Business CEOs don't know everything but they help hire the Chief Financial
Officer, the Chief Technology Officer, legal counsel, etc.

If senators can't get a few tech people to advise the senators and committee
chairpersons then they deserve to look like fools and be laughed at. It is
their job to hire people to help educate and advise them.

------
livueta
Since this is apparently a verbatim repost of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18813468](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18813468),
I'm going to repost my (lightly edited) comment from that empty thread since I
think it's a crap article with some serious flaws.

\---

This is a really disappointing article. I'd like to agree with the premise,
but some of the specific examples they chose to use seem a more than a little
unfair.

> There were the agonizing video clips from April’s Facebook hearing, in which
> 68-year-old Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) attempted to ask Facebook chief executive
> Mark Zuckerberg a question about data privacy, and revealed a conception of
> social media resembling a wad of tangled Christmas lights: “Do you track
> devices that an individual who uses Facebook has that is connected to the
> device that they use for their Facebook connection, but not necessarily
> connected to Facebook?”

Yeah, sure, the phrasing is not great, but interpreted charitably there's a
decent question in there:

> If I use Facebook on my desktop computer but don't use it on my phone, does
> Facebook still associate activity on my phone (e.g. browsing, location,
> payments) with my Facebook profile?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the answer's almost definitely yes
given existing info[1], and that that answer would be somewhat disquieting to
even the most tech-impaired senator.

> Come December it was the Google chief Sundar Pichai’s turn to visit the
> Capitol and watch Rep. Steve Cohen, the 69-year-old Democrat from Tennessee,
> wave his hands in the air and complain: “I use your apparatus often, or your
> search engine, and I don’t understand all of the different ways that you can
> turn off the locations. There’s so many different things!”

Google has an established track record[2] of forcing users to toggle multiple
settings to achieve a simple goal: "stop tracking location history!" Cohen is
fairly clearly referring to that issue. If frequent users can't figure out how
to disable location history due to dark UX patterns, that's a problem.

So, again, actually a pretty reasonable question that hits close to a lot of
fevered discussion in our circles[3].

This strikes me as, ironically enough, a technically illiterate reporter
trawling for bad-sounding Twitter-length excerpts while ignoring any of the
underlying issues.

At least the article goes on to quote Hatch's communications director:

> “Perhaps one part of the problem is Congress-illiteracy among tech
> reporters.”

> Maybe so. [continues to address tenuously related claims about the age of
> Congress, which in itself plays into avocado-toast tier reporting by
> generalizations]

What? That's got to be the weakest dismissal of a critique of the shallow
reporting model underlying pieces like this that I've ever seen.

\---

[1]
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/03/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/03/facebook-
track-browsing-history-california-lawsuit)

[2] [https://www.techlicious.com/blog/google-tracking-after-
locat...](https://www.techlicious.com/blog/google-tracking-after-location-
history-turned-off/)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17749330](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17749330)

~~~
ghaff
Yes, I actually don't see anything in that article that makes me come close to
doing a facepalm. Some of the questions aren't the most elegantly worded but
I'd be a lot more concerned if someone expressed surprise that users were
tracked or data kept or some other naive lack of understanding of how social
media and ad networks operate.

>revealed a conception of social media resembling a wad of tangled Christmas
lights

That actually seems like a pretty good analogy. I might use it someday.

There's also the sort of smug superiority that one often sees directed at
everyone who isn't as immersed in a particular field as the speaker or writer.

~~~
djur
The "Internet is a series of tubes" meme from years back was an earlier
example of this. The senator was trying to explain the concept of network
congestion. Now, his actual argument was garbage (it was an anti-net
neutrality argument), and there were things he said that were very funny (like
referring to an email as "an Internet"), but the "series of tubes" language
was a perfectly reasonable analogy.

~~~
ghaff
People who are deep in a particular area are often very dismissive of
metaphors and other simplifications or attempt to explain for a broader
audience because they're not "right." But that's often fine if you're trying
to get a concept across rather than writing technical documentation.

------
kappi
Putting term limits for Senators is a good way to get rid of this old club and
bring new blood. Some senators are there for their life.

~~~
nradov
It's not clear whether that would produce better outcomes. Some policy areas
like healthcare, transportation, and the military are tremendously complex. It
takes legislators years just to get up to speed on the issues. Inexperienced
legislators have to rely on their staffs and lobbyists for guidance, so if we
term out the experienced legislators then in effect we're handing more power
to un-elected staffers and lobbyists.

------
ehsankia
> average age 58 in the House, 62 in the Senate.

This right here is the main issue. The median age in the US is 38. Even if you
remove people under 18 which cannot serve in Congress, that would raise the
median to ~47.

~~~
djur
The constitutional age limitation for serving in Congress is 25 for the House
and 30 for the Senate.

