
If Congress Doesn't Understand Facebook, What Hope Do Its Users Have? - mlb_hn
https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-congress-day-one/
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noSurprises
It doesn't matter what congress feigns understanding of, or whatever failure
to comprehend they masquerade in front of the cameras.

Facebook is there to listen in on your private conversations, read your mail,
build up evidence for who you talk to and associate with. To seem benign and
trustworthy while all this takes place is part of the game.

There's this idea to scapegoat the mea culpa off onto faceless shadowy firms,
but none of what happened would have ever been possible, if facebook hadn't
conspired to log and sell the information it knew to be useful and powerful to
begin with.

To invert the blame onto Cambridge Analytica is a mistake, when Facebook's
data collection platform was designed to do everything it was used for from
the start.

Anything some political consultancy may have done, Facebook was and is doing
times a thousand, back then, yesterday, today and tomorrow. And the more time
that goes by the worse it gets.

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d0lph
To me it sounded like Cambridge Analytica approached an app developer who sold
them the data.

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jonex
The article isn't mainly about the subject in the title, it's more of a
general review of the hearing. However, regarding the question in the title:
It is hard to understand anything if you don't try. The article mentions that
people were asked before information were shared, but somehow did not
understand the implications about that, or did not even read the approval
before giving it. So my answer would be: Their hope is great great if they
care and carefully go trough their privacy settings and read approval messages
before giving. Lousy if they don't care and don't read anything on their
screen.

So maybe the solution isn't trying to bring in Zuckerberg into congress and
everybody's home to have an introductory course in Facebook privacy settings.
Maybe it's about teaching each other about how internet works and making
people more aware of how what they share could be used - which might make some
users actually care about understanding?

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squozzer
Many members of Congress owe their jobs to the deliberate cultivation of
obfuscation, while running for office and in the development of laws, so I'm
not sure if their ire at Z comes from genuine concern for their constituents
or if they are just protecting their turf.

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pm24601
Congress does not need to "understand" Facebook for them to pass a privacy
law.

Congress doesn't need to understand anything in order to pass a law concerning
it.

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_emacsomancer_
> Congress doesn't need to understand anything in order to pass a law
> concerning it.

They have made that abundantly clear.

