Political Quotes

“Mr. President, today we have a joint Commerce and Judiciary Committee hearing on online privacy and the abuse of data obtained by social media platforms. Ordinarily, I wouldn't come to the Senate floor to talk about an individual legislative hearing, but this is no run-of-the-mill event. The CEO of Facebook will be testifying, and I believe his company and other parties have some important explaining to do. One question is what Facebook's priorities are and whether they are what they should be. Facebook, of course, is a publicly traded company, and it has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders that it shares in common with every other shareholder-owned enterprise. Its business model is unique. It collects information on billions of people and uses that data to help drive its profits. One wonders whether, and at what point, that profit motive has come to be at odds with protecting the privacy of individual users. To me, that is one of the fundamental questions Mr. Zuckerberg is going to have to answer today. From testimony released yesterday, we know Facebook will admit it made mistakes; that it didn't take a broad enough view of its responsibility and prevent its tools from being used in ways that it says it did not intend. That act of contrition is one we all welcome, of course, but it will not matter much without additional action, some of which might be even foundational to Facebook's entire business model. Those changes, we are told, can take some time.…”