Facebook’s unofficial approach to violating the privacy of its users has always been “ask for forgiveness, not permission.” This week’s testimony by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg before a joint Judiciary and Commerce Committee in the Senate on Tuesday and the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday was no exception. During his two days on the Hill, Zuckerberg delivered canned apologies but largely avoided offering detailed explanations for how Facebook planned to change its business model (hint: it doesn’t), even while he answered questions about the Cambridge Analytica data leak, Russian election meddling . . . and chocolate.
“I’m communicating with my friends on Facebook and indicate that I love a certain kind of chocolate,” said Sen. Bill Nelson. “And all of a sudden, I start receiving advertisements for chocolate. What if I don’t want to receive those commercial advertisements?”
Zuckerberg, who exchanged his signature millennial jeans-and-hoodie for a sharp suit while in Washington, is one of Silicon Valley’s favorite princelings, and the stark contrast between him and the aging senators who questioned him, many of whom didn’t seem to understand how Facebook works, was telling. Pundits who argue that Facebook’s recent scandals have permanently derailed Zuckerberg’s hopes for a future political career should consider how much savvier he looks after facing the supposedly tough questioning on Capitol Hill. As one after another member of Congress asked simplistic questions about the business of online advertising or boasted about their number of social media followers (“I’ve got 4,900 friends on my Facebook page,” Sen. Thom Tillis said, “I’m a proud member of Facebook”) or their children’s Instagram accounts (“My son Charlie, who’s 13, is dedicated to Instagram,” said Sen. Roy Blunt), the proceedings began to border on the absurd. It was like watching members of Congress chain-smoke through hearings on the health effects of tobacco use.
The lackluster questioning also left unanswered two important questions: First, what is Facebook? Is it a neutral platform? A publisher? A utility? A monopoly? Given the company’s ambitions (it has invested heavily in artificial intelligence and virtual reality technology; it owns Instagram; and it recently launched a Messenger Kids app that targets children as young as 6, among other things), at the very least Congress should have made Zuckerberg go beyond the anodyne description he gave of Facebook as a “community.”
When he was asked about Facebook’s monopolistic power, Zuckerberg said, “It certainly doesn’t feel like that to me.” But his feelings don’t change the facts: With the exception of WeChat in China, Facebook is the world’s largest social network, and most of its users live outside the United States. It’s a global corporation with great power, and Zuckerberg, who by some estimates is worth $60 billion, controls 60 percent of it, a fact he seemed eager to downplay with his frequent references to the company’s humble origins in his college dorm room.
The second question the hearings avoided is: Are we willing to place limits on Facebook’s ambitions? Facebook’s long-term plans for its users’ data are far grander than merely selling targeted political ads during the next election cycle. Consider a 2014 patent application by Facebook for something called “Techniques for Emotion Detection and Content Delivery.” The application outlines a method for capturing, analyzing, and using data about individual’s emotional experiences in real time.
Facebook has been buying facial recognition technology companies for years and already uses artificial intelligence and proprietary algorithms to analyze users’ emotional experiences. As this patent application suggests, Facebook could soon deliver targeted information to advertisers (or theoretically to any other entity that it decided to consider a client) based on what it surmises are users’ real-time emotions, which would be gleaned from monitoring users’ facial expressions through their smartphone cameras or webcams and analyzing them via emotional-detection software.
These applications of “affective computing” (technologies that target how people feel in real time) and emotional analytics could provide advertisers with a wealth of new information about Facebook users, allowing them to offer more sophisticated and emotionally manipulative advertisements—or political propaganda—in an instant. No wonder Zuckerberg covers the camera on his own laptop with tape.
This is just one among hundreds of technologies that Facebook is developing, each of which poses ethical and political challenges. Given that the company has refused to share its data with scholarly researchers who aren’t funded by Facebook, we know next to nothing about the power or scope of these applications beyond what Facebook chooses to tell us (or what can be unearthed and inferred through patent applications). Zuckerberg should no longer be allowed to get away with claiming, as he did many times throughout his hearings, “I’m not aware of that” when he’s asked about these ambitions.
Nor should the public indulge in its willful ignorance about Facebook’s intentions. Facebook is not an earnest “community”; it’s a global business empire. If Zuckerberg’s turn on the Hill taught us anything, it’s that we can neither trust nor verify Facebook’s claims about what it is doing with our data. Sen. Nelson was flustered that Facebook could target him with ads for chocolate. He should be more concerned about a near-future when, in real time and through the lens of the camera embedded in his smartphone, Facebook will be analyzing and selling the senator’s emotional responses to chocolate as they watch him eat it.
