Everything that's wrong in Zuckerberg's hearing, in one paragraph
It’s there, in one article.
In “Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to Congress: the key moments”, Zuckerberg is quoted as answering:
every single time you go to share something on Facebook, whether it's a photo in Facebook, or a message, every single time, there's a control right there about who you're going to be sharing it with ... and you can change that and control that in line.
The issue is right in the “there’s a control right there” part: what other humans can or cannot see about you inside Facebook does not matter at all. The only real issue here is that there is no control allowing you to not share your data with Facebook itself, no way to get it, and no way you could ever really check if such a control was working as advertised. That is why it makes absolutely NO SENSE to ask for any regulation of Facebook, or for replacing platforms like Facebook with any other equally centralized platform. The only way to go is complete, but realistic decentralization, for the reasons I already explained here, here and here. Because this is the cost so far of insisting with “real” alternatives:
<u><em><strong>CAPTION:</strong>
<a href="/2018/02/the-cost-of-five-more-years-without-perclouds/" target="_blank">What demands to regulate or rebuild Facebook have achieved so far (click for details)</a>
</em></u>
While you’re at this, please also consider that:
- the creepiest part of Zuckerberg hearing may be where his vision of “artificial intelligence spotting fake news” may actually lead us
- Zuckerberg is 100% right when he says that “long privacy policies are very confusing. And if you make it long and spell out all the detail, then you’re probably going to reduce the per cent of people who read it and make it accessible to them.” But please note that the solution to that problem may be contracts that are REALLY smart.
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I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
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