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welcome to the 359 I'm Ben Fox ribbon a knob Dan Ackerman Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down for his first congressional hearings on Tuesday to respond to the Cambridge analytical breach perhaps the biggest scandal his 14-year old company has ever faced but after getting grilled for over four hours he seemed to come out largely unscathed in Facebook stock jumped four point five percent dan how do you think he did you know it's kind of its kind of like he dodged some bullets because the people asking the questions didn't really know how to get around behind him and and really get him with the gotcha questions but at the same time his robotic nature and the fact that he looked so uncomfortable up there and how could someone so much money look so uncomfortable in a suit is beyond me he's used to wearing a t-shirt yeah it's a bit of a draw in that suit ah you think he looked uncomfortable though I think that a lot of the well everybody's impressions are different but I think a lot of people saw this as Zuckerberg out outpaced expectations he looked poised he was very media trained he was on point this wasn't the Mark Zuckerberg from years past burger was fat sweating on camera it was certainly a much more poised situation than previously he just had to outlast all these questioners without saying anything radical or divisive and he largely did that I said last night after after seeing everyone kind of go off about this all day long I said this is an unpopular opinion I said on Twitter but I could not be less interested in watching all these hours and hours of Zuckerberg testimony because the Senators and staff don't know enough to ask the right questions and Zuck is so heavily media trained so much to avoid saying anything remotely interesting okay I mean look I would select agree with that actually but let's talk about what could actually change and let's start with regulation so Zuckerberg at least opened the door to the idea that look I'm willing to work with you guys on new regulation the problem is is that you and I both know that Congress has a very hard time getting even basic things done so what's your expectation even that would actually happen even basic things about technology and and I think he has to go up there and he has to appear open you certainly can't go up there and and appear closed off to it and say no that that's it we're not going to do this because then everyone would turn on him and and would rush something ridiculous through that wouldn't accomplish anything so in that way he did do the right thing he's he's playing ball but he also knows they're probably not gonna get it together in any meaningful sense and of course it goes against the entire ethos of the governing party to want to regulate a private business so he has that on his side as well so let's also talk about what Facebook as a company hopes to do Zuckerberg talked about the idea that they're gonna do a lot more self-regulating in that they're going to police themselves much more they're gonna be a much more proactive they said we're having this big philosophical shift at the company and do you do you actually believe that's going to be the case and in years to come this is going to be a different looking Facebook I mean there's two big there's two big issues or two big problems they have to confront a number one is they're not doing anything that's really all that radically different from a lot of other companies that mind a certain amount of data about you and secondly they have to they have to come to grips the fact that you and I and these senators may may care about all this but I've talked to a lot of just regular Facebook users and they're not that concerned about it they don't have the same expectation of privacy that you and I do rightly or wrongly just as in years past they would use Gmail and they wouldn't be concerned that that Google was scanning their emails and giving them contextual ads based on the content of their emails like that horrified me we're gonna folks would be like alright I kind of expected them to do it so I wanted to end with one more question there's there's kind of this broad consensus that or or there's there's this argument that like maybe Facebook should start getting you to pay subscriptions for getting an ad free service do you think that that would work would you sign up for it do you think that would ever actually it's so interesting a premium model there are some social networks and services that we all use that have premium models that you can trade up to I'm not sure they would get enough from a subscription to offset what they would lose in terms of the data because I think their larger subset of data is is you know the massive conglomeration of all this information is what's really valuable to them so I doubt you could ever fully opt-out no matter what you paid them well Dan thank you very much if you want to read more about these stories check us out on CNN I'm Ben Fox Ruben and I'm Dan Ackerman thanks for listening so it's pretty quiet in the chat today and I think people are tired of hearing about Zuckerberg to be frank really not that surprised but you know this was this was the big thing and it got an enormous amount of attention much more than a lot of other congressional hearings this was the story du jour yesterday so we would be remiss if we didn't talk about it I do have one good question start now from syringe oh he says what do you think of the extra seat cushion that Zuckerberg had to sit on to make himself look big I think look if I was pretty standard I mean I'm just gonna sit there for four hours I would have liked to have a giant seat cushion to sit on to I mean I sit for a lot of TV interviews with leaders and reporters and and every time they have me and the other person they are they sighs I stop and they figure out whose chair is gonna be higher and lower and how to make everything look even you know he's not a tall guy and he's also sitting lower down in the room then then all the said they're deliberately up above him and I I call no no foul on that okay it just seems odd he if he was next to somebody they want to even him out especially for the sake of the camera angles and whatnot but for him to sit alone on this cushion which doesn't look comfortable looks like he's having to like anything out of it we'd have to see out what other people who have been in that room at that desk have done if this is the only cushioning that we've seen or if it is a common practice yeah yeah but as we said yesterday too you know he was so media trained that there wasn't really a very high expectation that there was gonna be this big oh my god moment where he was gonna accidentally fly you know he was media trained in that he played it close to the vest and he just answered questions in a simple manner and he made sure not to show his cards he wasn't media trained in the sense that he was convivial and chatty and conversational and and got people to embrace him as a personality he was there I say his normal robotic self I felt like he was less robotic than usual but you know he was also like you said he was just very clipped responses ai is making great strides where we're moving towards that uncanny valley and she's close to passing the Turing test he's not quite there yet but he's getting there he just wants to learn to love why does this thing you humans call a kiss I wish we could get away with it without getting our butts sued off but right before we started the podcast Dan was sitting here monologuing from the screenplay for Blade Runner oh he was doing it and it was so perfect the we could do a bit of that no we can't I'm just quoting from a movie I'm doing a couple of movie quotes it's the electrical property don't even bother it's not worth it just use your imagination dance soothing voice Zuckerberg sitting in front of a questioner looking into a little box and the guys on the other side smoking and it says duck see a tortoise lying on its back belly baking in the Sun we're getting sued all right so let's talk about helping Zach why aren't you helping it Dredd headlocks awesome name is this just a dog and pony show or are they actually going to ask him some serious questions into what security was leaked now it sounds like they're actually in the midst of that right now as we are sitting here chatting at least it seemed like it was heading that direction when I departed the hearing this morning I wish I had mentioned this earlier as I was coming to the podcast Alfred Inge who's watching the whole thing unfold now told me that Zuckerberg was in fact part of the 87 million who had their data breached as part of the Cambridge analytical breach and I was not neither was I excellent we both checked up on it but I guess Mark where somebody mark knows did that silly quiz resulted in this whole situation but let's not use the word breach to too strongly here what information exactly was shared from my understanding some of it is just the very public information you have on your public facing Facebook page it just got scraped it wasn't anything you know hidden behind your personal like friends only firewall was like your name in your hometown it depends on what you allow people to see hmm so calling this a breach I think is still a strong word it's it's an inappropriate use of data that was collected data of misuse a mis sharing but this wasn't a hack in any way this is no you know a breach indicates that there was some security that was circumvented yeah and the only circumventing really happened against Facebook's rules is that somebody who got all this information and data and got it according to Facebook's rules then turn around and shared it with a third party they were not supposed to so that's not really a breach that's a misuse of information that you got from Facebook by a third party hidden Fox sorry what I was just saying good point yeah hidden Fox largely agrees cousin and Fox the hidden Fox and hidden Fox hidden Fox yeah they say is that nice to hear from you hidden Fox they felt that the environment was too jovial to be taken seriously and that he seemed to get off really really easy yeah now it'll be the general impression to contrast that Michael Brown was saying that I appreciate the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is taking full responsibility for this however I never thought their business model was really a good idea monetizing people's personal thoughts basically I want to adjust everybody yes true I think the thing is is that you know Zuckerberg definitely made an admission of guilt he said the buck stops here this is my company I take the blame for this type of situation the problem is and I've seen this reported on before is that they've made a lot of mistakes and he's done apology tours in the past and he's apologized plenty of times in the past so the question is what's actually going to change because there have been these dust-ups previously about your privacy settings are too confusing or too Byzantine they make small tweaks on the side they don't really change a lot so I think people would be right to be skeptical waring is gonna change they change it too much that once you figure out where all the privacy and security settings are on Facebook when you go back later they've changed it all around a reconfigure and then you have to relearn it and that's that's really the that's really the issue yeah I mean look to broaden it out looking at a lot of the Google Chrome settings just how a lot of that stuff is set up and how you reduce the types of ad targeting and cookies they could do a better job of making that a little bit clearer so but you could also do the same thing with with your Google Account with with a lot of other things you could click on that little blue triangle in any of the five million banner ads you see every day and go to that ad choices page where you can opt out of all these ad networks so it's not just Facebook that's that that's tracking you all over the place it's it's all these ad networks and it's Google right and and other people which is ultimately why I think it's a good conversation that we're all having as far as this is what happens when your privacy does get you know utilized in these misuses so it is good that we're talking about I don't appear to be pro Facebook or pro big company but you know what do people expect when they go into these sharing platforms and they share and they're using the platform for free and and they know that it's you know and and marketing supported I I think people sometimes have an unrealistic expectation that they get all these goods and services for free and and there's no trade-off there yeah I just want a quick shout out hidden Fox you were great Metal Gear Solid yeah I just want to include a sentiment somewhat agreeing with Michael Browns earlier statement and that I was legitimately impressed with how well put together Zuckerberg was I thought he was very well handled I'm no I'm not alone in that opinion but I do still see fear in his eyes hmm I didn't I know a lot of people say he's been truly poised but I think what it really comes down to is he is taking it quite personally and I think that's endearing in this case and yeah the flopsweat is is there it's just just well well masked by the TV makeup I'm sure he's wearing it's got that look in his eyes yeah look the problem is is what are they actually gonna do to him you know like what would regulation look like it's one thing to say are you for regulation and then really what though and then he says yes for the right regulation or the who wouldn't say that the complaints have oh your Terms of Service are too confusing how is that different from every other Terms of Service you ever click through from Apple or Microsoft er or Sony or a or Google or anybody else it's not really yeah yeah in fact Facebook Facebook's material now is much more open and easy to read than most other people's because they've been called on the carpet so many times for it we did a TV news piece not that long ago where we went through a lot of the Terms of Service and things on Facebook and frankly the layout and and the way they explain things in the way they cut things up was was much better than I've seen from almost anyone else at least in the most recent version I'm not in the past sure total mess hidden Fox still thinks that the Senate's dropping the ball when Zuck was asked about people departing Facebook and taking their account offline and all that he was critical of that that no one in the Senate followed up with but do you destroy their information or do you still keep that about them are there any other major details you think that they've completely glassed over in this proceeding now that's Facebook's fault because they muddy this issue a lot when they hear oh you only Facebook all right click this button to suspend your account and that just kind of hides it but keeps everything there and then if you want to actually delete it that's a whole nother process you have to go through and even then they say we're not gonna erase your data for a certain amount it's gonna take a while to pull all your stuff down although I think he didn't answer one question and and and say that once they actually do that they can't recreate it got it but at that point somebody else probably already has it but to the that to a certain extent sounds like there is a value to the user in doing that though in that you know let's say you wanted to suspend your account you wanted to take a digital break from this or something maybe they shouldn't make it so easy to delete it entirely they don't you know they they make it easy to suspend they make it harder because people are say that's it I'm quitting Facebook and then they click that button and then they and then they are gonna come and they come back month later to go oh all right I guess I can bring it all back in they're back to where they were right and we just say all of this is why over the years I've always kept my MySpace page I need to go validate this now is that true it's probably somewhere unfortunately I don't think any of this benefits that one social media company ello is that what it was yeah man hello it's like a speech the other one peach oh yeah I think around I still get emails from them I'm like I've got that Google+ yeah plus is still there Google+ exists but more more that Israel that is their slogan we we exist and we're all switching to discord but yeah that's the problem is like what exactly is the alternative for the time being it seems that there's no upstart that's really going to take out Facebook there are plenty of alternatives oh the turn of this but it's not why everybody in your family that's a terrible idea no but I mean they're obviously there ever we all know I don't need to list them but they are different experiences and I think that's largely why this has become such a sought-after proceeding I mean people are interested in it because above all else as being reiterated in the chat right now Facebook seems to be more personal than a lot of the other places you could argue Instagram but Twitter snapchat that seems to be a little more commercialized a little more fleeting Facebook being so personal gets a lot of passion out of people you feels like it's truly an invasion of your privacy and that's I know a redundant statement but it feels more like so it makes him to your home that makes a lot of sense to me because it is in many ways Facebook does encourage you to share a lot of your own personal life and it is kind of like your personal blog like this is the defense the spear down your network because that when you connect with is a friend or a PR unlike Instagram or Twitter where you're just projecting out to anonymous people who follow you right and that's why maybe it's discomforting people for people to be reminded that there's this giant gorilla in the middle of this whole social network that's pulling all your information and packaging it for advertisers and sometimes completely misusing your data and that is certainly something that everybody needs to be reminded hopefully Facebook does actually change some of those things I mean if but what would I change chastened by this maybe they are actually you know other than what they already did which has changed the rules for how third parties who collect information can use it and can share it with other people that's the that's the main thing I don't think they're planning on changing anything about what they store and collect and what they sell the only the only real changes they've talked about are are making sure that no one gets some of that information and then resells that the repackaging and reselling may be you know not just because it's potentially a violation of your privacy but also because somebody's making money off that data and they're not getting their cut yeah yeah and the midterms are gonna be a good testing ground no show no no votes in the midterms will be decided by anyone's opinion on Facebook I don't know I very go on it right now we'll see about that it's not gonna be a driving issue for people continuing on with the whole personal sentiment number of people in the chat site that people don't fully understand how Facebook works and maybe from Chris garner that people should realize that they don't want if you don't want your information shared maybe don't create an account you know the people do opt in to this to a certain extent and really opt in it's just 100 percent object and okay all right you make how much truly is on Facebook as a fault they have I I would it's a great question but I would say that they and haven't done enough to police their own platform and Zuckerberg said just as much yesterday he said that what we would do is create tools and just expect people to use them for good now we're having this philosophical shift and saying we're gonna create tools and then make sure people are using them for the right reasons as opposed to you know hate speech Russian trolls election meddling all that other studying on that stuff I think is much more important than you know trying to let people know that they're letting advertisers know what their home town is and what and what pages what band fan pages they like mm-hmm I like wean man I've gone pro Facebook I can't believe it yeah how I feel but at the same hi people with our key people whining that they're getting exactly what they signed up for doesn't hold a lot of water with me fair enough that's a good point expanding on that from huy egg isn't this about a much larger problem ethics in the corporate world seems at face book and tech giants aren't alone in this now that's another really great point and I don't know I don't have the chops to speak on that Ben maybe you do with it living in the Amazon world I could probably talk about it broadly in the tech world because like tech is definitely the the space that I exist in but the misuse of data and the complete lack of regulation around data particularly in the United States is something that I think is a conversation that we all really do need to be having especially with the EU passing new regulations with the GD P R that's gonna go into effect next month that's I'm sure a lot of US citizens are looking at that and saying gee I wish our government did something similar but that's a real restriction like just like that right to be forgotten in Europe where if you go to Google they're in a European country you're not gonna get the same results that you get here because people have frankly often fairly ridiculous reasons for requesting redactions and we would not allow that here because that would be a prior restraint on publication basically and or yeah it could even be viewed as uh you know infringing right your right to know is is all we always consider the the larger public good of free exchange of information to be more important than an individual's right to hide something embarrassing or negative about themselves in Europe though they feel differently and they don't have the same baked-in constitutional protections that that put that right paramount above all others that's a good point yeah I think with the GDP are a lot of folks view it as a positive in that it has stricter regulations on how you collect data as a tech company and how that data is stored and disseminated that's something that's broadly it seems lacking but anyone who's looked at how Europe as a whole the European Union has has regulated various industries knows that they are terrible at it and their answer is always more regulation that strangles you know businesses for ridiculous reasons because a guy a new legislator in one country can't understand what's happening in entry in another country and that's one of the reasons why people scratch their head and said I can't believe the brexit people won you know a lot of that was because people were afraid of this overreaching European Union regulatory uh thrust I like the farmers in the UK I like this version of Daniel you know weird we're taking orders from other countries about what to do with their cows pro-business dan calm man is a very enjoyable day in accra Mendel who knew so there's a few requests for us to commentate on some more of the political issues of the these hearings and it's not really our forte but we can my forte we can try well that try not to get too political but from Josef del mondo do you guys find the breakdown of the countries that were affected by the Cambridge analytical scandal interesting I'm mostly interested interested and how the Philippines was the close second in the breakdown now I have absolutely zero perspective on that but maybe you guys do I can't say that I know much about that my understanding is just based on who took that quiz and who their friends were who were linked to it because it went you know one degree of separation down so that might just be you know who got served that that that quiz and took it but beyond that I I do not know thanks for trying lost legacy do you think anyone from Facebook's can get fired for this oh that's a great question the question lost lost legacy Zuckerberg has been asked this a few times apparently nobody's been fired yet in some cases a firing would be an even broader admission of guilt and who would be fired and what would the what would they have done to deserve that because their case has always been and frankly if you look at it they're not entirely wrong they they operated under their own guidelines and it's a third party who then misused this information and disseminated it and they had no control over that and you could say well they shouldn't have let it get to that point anywhere where someone had the ability to do and that's true but they were still operating within their own guidelines so anyone who worked on that would not have been violating a company policy as far as we can tell right now that's a good point from Mike Brown I thought the interview was very monumental in the tech industry when Facebook makes its changes do you think people will still enjoy it have we perspective theorized about any of the changes that could come beyond the the most recent policy change about ad sharing I think that their efforts to clean up some of the bad actors you know like the hate speech like the election meddling like the sharing fake stories fake stories of fake people gaming the system to get things to the top of people's newsfeeds that's a major day you know so answering Michaels question I don't know that anybody's gonna particularly miss that stuff because it's gaming the system and it's already broken now everyone's complaining about their new emphasis on things that your friends interact with or like or comment on means every time you go to Facebook the same stories at the top of your newsfeed because people keep commenting on and they're liking it cuz they see it I've noticed and that then it's because it's at the top more people do it and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that that stays like the top posts like two days at a time so clearly there's more there's more tweaking they have to do yeah and they're constantly trying to do that just to make sure that you continue to engage gasps read stuff it's mainly at a more boring experience though because you see the same thing if you go back later in the day at the top of your feet and that seems like a mistake and I think they were aware of that and I'm sure they're working on tweaking that yeah and in the meantime we'll see how much any of this is really impacted their user growth their monthly active users daily active users that's what it's all about yeah from what you said before it wouldn't surprise me that the impact will not be that significant not as a matter talk about this you know the broader public is probably aware of Cambridge analytic now you don't think so a lot of public can't name the vice president that's Joe Biden I know the broader public is not aware if you did a man on the street survey and he said what is average analytical I would joke three out of three out of twenty would would be able to give you the correct answer maybe five or six out of 20 would it would even say they heard of the name well in that regard if you are right and I feel like that would be unfortunate if that were true I congratulate our YouTube listeners for being so well-informed self-selecting group of very smart people who know quality podcast news and entertainment when they hear it all right we have just enough time for a couple more quick keys from Michael Brown what do you guys think the difference between the data that gets collected by Google Facebook Twitter reddit do we know exactly how much each of these can collect where they pull from where it goes to yeah The Wall Street Journal had a good graphic on this yesterday that Michael you should definitely check out it basically shows that Facebook has a tendency to collect more data and more kinds of data but they all collect data to a certain extent but if you're looking at it from a level of egregious Nisour just the amount of specificity that they do acquire Facebook does tend to be on more of the extreme plus people do share more if their lives and their information on Facebook as opposed to on Google or with Twitter I mean like other doesn't know what iSchool I got into but but Google does collect a tremendous amount of information and built a profile of relator you can go and see right and that can follow you from website to website and serve you a lot of contextual ads and it is pretty scary or surprising to find out how much they're able to profile people relating to their search and they also as you said they scrape Gmail accounts so it's it's something that it would be really really hard to get away from these things to not have so much of your data scraped I'm sure a lot of people have tried to do that kind of thing but you know these companies are really critical in people's lives a lot of time a lot of the time so it's hard to do it so bringing out our fine tooth combs Chris garner asked does the Facebook term specify what they have the right to take as far as information goes and how ever they want to use it how detailed are the terms of service they are very detailed I'd have to try to look them up right now but there there was a very good series of pages that they had that are color-coded and have like basically a little jump links in between them and you can follow this whole path of what they collect and how they use it I don't know how if they list everything specifically in there but having looked at them very recently for a TV segment I I thought they deserved a little bit of credit for that let me draw your attention to Exhibit A from yesterday's hearing I don't know which senator that is or who that is making the the savage statement as it was but I thought that was pretty solid roundup to encapsulate I don't think it's any worse than anybody else's I thought that was a that was a get my get my face on the news pre-planned quote there I mean that's the attitude you've had undertaken about most most of this I just think they're they're bad but says everybody else fair enough okay we are out of time I think we have really gone in deep on this and I'm tired of hearing his name so here it is data policy right here on and really you can scroll you could scroll through that am I really doing this I don't know quality TV for having a clear layout of their data policy I mean it's even easier to read on the web version it would be interesting to see how many people actually read any of them I had to go find it to do this TV news segment so you know I had to go dig for it but the layout and the was good it was written in plain English so you know a tiny bit of credit for that so a tiny bit and I think geniuses don't dominate the world by accident yeah and robots will see if we do more Facebook tomorrow we'll see what ends up happening but there are hearings going on today so yeah maybe something else in tech will happen but we we don't know the first time I've ever said this I hope they drop like a new iPhone or something like this right we need something else yeah but I know we are at a time thanks everybody thank you Dan Thank You Ben thank you sucky mix uh Kherson and we'll be back tomorrow with more yeah hopefully not Facebook but yeah thanks everybody for all your questions hopefully we were able to answer all of them reasonably well the 3:59 podcast is available on itunes tune and stitcher feedburner google play music the amazon echo and of course cnet.com dan thank you again and we'll see you all again tomorrow take care they're just questions down and answer to your query down for me