House of Commons committee re-invites Mark Zuckerburg to appear [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

House of Commons committee re-invites Mark Zuckerburg to appear [pdf]

parliament.uk

I’m surprised that neither these questions nor those by U.S. Congress last month include a request to provide an exhaustive list of all types of data that Facebook has on its users, including data bought from third parties (e.g. credit score) or acquired via subsidiaries (e.g. browser history from that Vonavo VPN app). Or am I missing something, and is such a list available somewhere?

It's Onavo

(edit: When I wrote this, this thread was a link to the following Twitter post, but of course that context was lost by Hacker News.)

https://mobile.twitter.com/CommonsCMS/status/991302283920015...

Almost certainly more useful, providing not just the tiny bit of understanding from this tweet and the full wording of the letter but also providing context and reasons and, well, actual information (Twitter is so damned useless), is this this article from the Parliament.

https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z...

I'm not that familiar with the UK legal sphere - how and why is this an ultimatum and what happens if Zuckerberg doesn't appear before the committee?

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/contempt-witn...

And the relevant bit (for persons under UK jurisdiction):

> Historically, those found guilty of contempts could be fined or imprisoned, but those sanctions have not been used by the Commons since 1666 and 1880 respectively. For all sorts of practical, legal and constitutional reasons, it is highly doubtful that the modern House would seriously consider this.

That's interesting the HOC and HOL have a lot of power deriving from their long history that doesn't tend to be used.

I am fairly sure that they cant just put a motion of attainder on the order paper any more :-) But if something really damming came out in the windrush scandal (forcibly repatriating BAME 70 year old citizens).

They could get rid of the current prime minister in 24-48 hours.

If they want answers on legal proceedings and advertising, they need to invite the Chief counsel and Boz; Mark probably knows very little about either.

Would be pretty useful to see Mr. Zuckerberg in a parliamentary style debate (the motion, arguments for, arguments against, counterarguments on both sides, and a vote). For examples of how to conduct this style of debate a great podcast that follows this format is "Intelligence Squared". "The Motion" could be "FB is good for society".

"MPs found the majority of Mr Schroepfer’s answers about Facebook’s business practices, including their policies on the privacy and protection of users’ data and their relationship with Cambridge Analytica and associated companies, to be unsatisfactory."

"Mr Schroepfer, who was appearing as a witness in the Committee’s inquiry into Fake News, failed to answer fully on nearly 40 separate points, including.....

This is interesting, so are these like a rogue group of MP's who actually take their job seriously and think government should return to its non-theatre basis?

Select committees and there are a lot of them actually do a lot of real work as opposed to the eqvielent committees in the USA.

A lot of legislation starts out that way and also they can effectively say Mr/MS x is not a fit and proper person to be a director which is a serious problem for uk domiciled companies as they would have to be fired.

"so are these like a rogue group of MP's who actually take their job seriously and think government should return to its non-theatre basis?"

This brief fit of apparent competence is probably just a temporary aberration. Normal service should resume shortly.

> This is interesting, so are these like a rogue group of MP's who actually take their job seriously and think government should return to its non-theatre basis?

This is possible, but the theatrical value of these (televised) hearings shouldn't be underestimated.

But if politicians asked real questions and demanded actual answers, the theatrical value could be replaced by actual value, which is supposed to be the point of the democratic process in the first place. As it is, more times than not we are paying a massive number of very expensive people to engage in theatre that no one wants to watch to produce results that often do more harm than good, and are rarely resemble what the voting public wants.

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