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Hearings Show Congress Doesn’t Understand Facebook Well Enough To Regulate It

Mark Zuckerberg has spent an awful lot of time in the hot seat over the last two days. For those of us who have been paying attention to Facebook and its litany of scandals over the past few months, Zuck's testimony in front of committees from the Senate and a …

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Instagram Will Soon Let Users Download All Their Photos, Videos and Messages

Instagram said it will launch a new data-portability tool — which will let users download all the content they've ever shared on the service — after the data-privacy practices of its parent Facebook have been the subject of intense scrutiny over the last several weeks. “We are building a new …

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Shadow profiles: Facebook has information you didn’t hand over

But some in congress weren't impressed with that response, including Rep. Ben Lujan, a Democrat from New Mexico. To learn more about what information Facebook collects beyond what users knowingly hand over, Lujan asked Zuckerberg on Wednesday about something called "shadow profiles.". Read More

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Former Facebook exec says regulation would be good for Facebook, bad for competition

Increased regulation in the tech sector will be advantageous to companies that have their own data — such as Facebook, Google and Amazon — but will hurt others, says former Facebook employee Kevin Knight. "There's this notion that Facebook can't regulate itself," says Knight. But he says members … Read More

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How much would you pay for Facebook without ads?

Back in 2010, a young Mark Zuckerberg told lawmakers that Facebook would always be free. Eight years later, a more grown-up Zuckerberg updated his stance to Congress, saying “There will always be a version of Facebook that is free.” That statement leaves open the possibility that Facebook will … Read More

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Facebook, This Is Not What “Complete User Control” Looks Like

Zuckerberg's language here misses the critical distinction between the information a person actively shares, and the information that Facebook takes from users without their knowledge or consent. Zuckerberg's insistence that users have “complete control” neatly overlooks all the ways that users … Read More

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Congressional Leaders Press Zuckerberg On Political Bias, Data Collection At Facebook

The House committee's questions were overall more pointed and combative than the Senate's yesterday, digging into concerns about the scope of Facebook's data collection, whether Facebook communicates its policies simply enough to users and the social network's security vulnerabilities. Read More

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Mark Zuckerberg Leaves Washington With Bumps and Bruises, but Otherwise Unscathed

This week, Zuckerberg arrived in Washington under starkly different circumstances to explain to a scowling tribunal of lawmakers on Capitol Hill why Facebook, a company whose user base amounts to a quarter of the world's population, had systematically failed to protect the private information of its … Read More

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Why Facebook’s 2011 Promises Haven’t Protected Users

Over 10 hours of questioning about Facebook's privacy practices on Tuesday and Wednesday, Zuckerberg fielded numerous questions about one of the few government enforcement actions against his company: a 2011 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission to settle allegations that … Read More

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6 things to know about your Facebook account

To Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's credit, users do opt in to a lot of Facebook's services, many of which share your data either directly with the company, third-party developers or advertisers. If we're being real, not many of us read through exactly what's being shared as we rush to log …