
‘There’s so many different things’: How technology baffled elderly Congress - myinnerbanjo
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
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livueta
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 unrelated narrative thread]

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.

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[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)

