Senate Embarrasses Themselves in Facebook Hearing

I agree with Cenk. There were actually quite few "bad" questions, even those that for some have "obvious" answers.

The bigger issue is that in some cases the questions were a bit too general, which allowed Zuckerberg to respond to them while actually dodging giving the right answer.

Like for instance, the senator Ana thinks embarrassed himself the most, was trying to figure out just how much Facebook allows users to delete the data the company has collected on them or data the users have given to third-party developers. But Zuckerberg is pretending to be dumb and not fully understand the question and says "but Senator, we already allow you to delete the data!"

But we know Zuckerberg is being misleading there. Facebook doesn't allow you to delete all the data they have on you. They allow you delete the data you've posted online yourself at most (and maybe some other interactions on the platform, but it definitely doesn't include data gotten from cookie tracking and whatnot).

The Senate questions were actually pretty good. It's the House questions that I found much more boring/uninteresting and repetitive. I think the biggest mistake the House members made and also a bit the senators was to confuse advertisers with third-party developers.

So they kept asking questions about Facebook "giving/selling data to advertisers" when Facebook is mostly doing that with third-party developers, and they are the ones actually getting your data. Also, Facebook has been sharing your data with data brokers, but almost nobody asked the right questions about that.

And when someone did, Zuckerberg again dodged easily saying "we've ended those partnerships" but there was no follow-up asking what happened to all the data they've given them for years, which was very disappointing to see.