Politics

Congress Talks Tough To Facebook For Exposing User Data But Hasn’t Issued Subpoenas

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Sens. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, and John Kennedy, a Republican, demanded answers from Facebook on Tuesday for the company’s recent data collection debacle but threatened no action.

“I think [Mark Zuckerberg] should explain to the American people how this happened,” Klobuchar said. “How many people were hurt and most importantly, how they’re going to fix it. Because you just can’t have 50 million Americans have their private data exposed without their permission, a couple hundred thousand of them may have answered a quiz by a Russian American professor that somehow Facebook decided could have access to the data, and this is what’s happened.”

Klobuchar said she wants to institute new regulations to hold social media companies to the same standard as the press.

“I think you have a product where it has been designed without a lock or without an alarm and big surprise, some of the bad guys have gotten in,” she continued. “He needs to explain that as well as the fact that we don’t get support for our honest ads act … which would simply put the social media sites on the same rules of the game as you see for print media and radio, TV ads.”

Instead of asking about subpoenaing Zuckerberg, host John Berman asked why victims of the data breach should be concerned and Kennedy’s answer was underwhelming and vague.

“Facebook is a great company, but it’s no longer a company,” Kennedy said. “It’s a country. That’s how powerful it is. And its behavior lately has kind of ben getting into the foothills of creepy. My interests are larger than Cambridge Analytica. I want to know to what extent, if any, those of us on Facebook live in a contrived universe. Created by Facebook, sort of like Truman on The Truman show. I want to know if Facebook has been a good steward of our data. I want to talk with Facebook about the bargain we struck with Facebook. We know what we get. We get free access to the site. What does Facebook get?”

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