‘There’s so many different things’: How technology baffled elderly Congress
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
> There were the agonizing video clips from April’s Facebook hearing, in which 68-year-old Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) attempted to ask Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg a question about data privacy, and revealed a conception of social media resembling a wad of tangled Christmas lights: “Do you track devices that an individual who uses Facebook has that is connected to the device that they use for their Facebook connection, but not necessarily connected to Facebook?”
Yeah, sure, the phrasing is not great, but interpreted charitably there's a decent question in there:
> If I use Facebook on my desktop computer but don't use it on my phone, does Facebook still associate activity on my phone (e.g. browsing, location, payments) with my Facebook profile?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the answer's almost definitely yes given existing info[1], and that that answer would be somewhat disquieting to even the most tech-impaired senator.
> Come December it was the Google chief Sundar Pichai’s turn to visit the Capitol and watch Rep. Steve Cohen, the 69-year-old Democrat from Tennessee, wave his hands in the air and complain: “I use your apparatus often, or your search engine, and I don’t understand all of the different ways that you can turn off the locations. There’s so many different things!”
Google has an established track record[2] of forcing users to toggle multiple settings to achieve a simple goal: "stop tracking location history!" Cohen is fairly clearly referring to that issue. If frequent users can't figure out how to disable location history due to dark UX patterns, that's a problem.
So, again, actually a pretty reasonable question that hits close to a lot of fevered discussion in our circles[3].
This strikes me as, ironically enough, a technically illiterate reporter trawling for bad-sounding Twitter-length excerpts while ignoring any of the underlying issues.
At least the article goes on to quote Hatch's communications director:
> “Perhaps one part of the problem is Congress-illiteracy among tech reporters.”
> Maybe so. [continues to address unrelated narrative thread]
What? That's got to be the weakest dismissal of a critique of the shallow reporting model underlying pieces like this that I've ever seen.
---
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/03/facebook-...
[2] https://www.techlicious.com/blog/google-tracking-after-locat...