Présentation en anglais de l'audition de Mark Zuckerberg devant le congrès américain

MARK ZUCKERBERG & the US Congress

I am going to talk about Mark Zuckerberg's hearing in front of the US congress, on the 10th of november.

So, Facebook is accused of leaking the personal data of 87 million users to a compagny which worked for Donald Trump's campaign.

It all begins in 2014, with a quizz online from the political consulting firm "Cambridge Analytica", which was sent to 300 000 americans. The quizz was about their personality. To complete the quizz, they had to log into their facebook account, which gaved the compagny accesses to their profile (birthdate, locations, and likes), and their friend's profiles (even when they didn't answer the quizz).

In fact, we are talking about 270 000 people who had answer the quizz, and almost 87 million of friend's profiles which leaked. It's close to one quarter of all the US FB users. Then the Cambridge Analytica used the profiles to send political messages. Moreover, we don't really know if it affected the elections. Whatever, it's a violation of facebook's policies. In case, Facebook was awared of the situation in december 2015 and choose to not talk about this to the public.

Mark Zuckerberg was summoned before the United States Congress (Senate and House of Representatives), to talk about this case and others problems link to FB.

The Democratic senator from Illinois, made a metaphor, by asking to Zuckerberg if he would share with everybody, the name of the hotel where he slept, and the name of the people he talked with. Mark Zuckerberg answered no, but that's exactly what Facebook is doing everytime, by asking your location for example.

An other senator asked if user's data are still track even when they are offline of FB, Mark Zuckerberg didn't answer, but we know that in 2016, fb was sentenced for doing this.

Also, he didn't answer when they ask how long the data are keep in FB when the account has been deleted.

Mark Zuckerberg apologized, and said that Facebook will commit to put more controls.

There will be a new regulation about the protection of personal data in Europe.

I personally, knew that facebook is tracking everything we do, and keeping our pictures etc. So i wasn't surprised. I don't think this is normal, but i thought Facebook was allowed to do that and we just had to accept this.

Nevertheless, there aren't many solutions if you want to protect your data :

you can regularly check the privacy settings of your Facebook account

you can verify the permissions grant to applications

or you can definitively delete your facebook account.

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