How tech baffled an elderly Congress | Hacker News Reader

How tech baffled an elderly Congress

digitaledition.baltimoresun.com

29 pointshispanic25 comments

> 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?”

This seems like a very legitimate question. He wants to know if Facebook tracks e.g. your FitBit. It's connected to your phone, and your phone is connected to Facebook, but your FitBit isn't connected to Facebook. And to be honest, I don't know the answer to that question. I would hope that they can't, but knowing the state of the tech world (IoT: the 'S' stands for security), it's probably possible, and knowing what we know about Facebook, if it's possible they are probably doing it.

Not that Zuckerberg would necessarily know or confess to it before the Senate, but that's a separate issue (I often wonder what is the point of calling a corporate executive to DC anyway, since they have every reason to dissemble and no reason to cooperate in good faith).

> I often wonder what is the point of calling a corporate executive to DC anyway, since they have every reason to dissemble and no reason to cooperate in good faith

Showboating, I've always assumed. A good deal of the questioning was clearly grandstanding, and a good number of the questions asked could have been answered by the Senators' grandchildren.

That said, if you want to grandstand, you should first run your questions by your grandchildren so they can tell you about online advertising and such, lest you look like a fool on national television.

Misguided way of looking at things imho. He is bringing more attention to the question and a larger non-technical audience now is aware.

I have known techies voicing issues and asking questions about Facebook practices wayback in 2008-9. You can say it took 10 years for the rest of the population to start asking the same questions. But I see it as a failure of the early warning technical crowd, who knew bad things were unfolding, to warn us faster.

Whats the lesson there?

It's an entirely legitimate question given the connected nature of our devices and is embarrassing for the Baltimore Sun as they attempt to mock Congress for supposedly being baffled. Given the last decade of their abusive behavior I'm more inclined to believe that Facebook's own conception of social media is in fact a lot more fucked up than a tangled wad of Christmas lights.

If you connect your Fitbit account to Facebook for the purpose of friend-finding, Facebook may keep track of your being a Fitbit user. However, Fitbit does not connect your device to Facebook. The possible exception to this is if you have a smart watch from Fitbit and a third party app establishes such a connection. Fitbit does not act as an intermediary here and so cannot keep your information private.

(Disclosure — I am a Fitbit engineer.)

Excuse me for this curt reply, but do you have plans to support apps in the Fibit Blaze? Thanks!

I would never say never, but I don't know of any plans to do this and it would shock me if we did. Blaze has a different OS from Ionic/Versa.

Thanks!

> We don’t yet have comprehensive age data for the next Congress

Am I understanding this correctly? As of January 2[0], the day before the new session began, no one had yet compiled a full list of the ages of all members of Congress? That's baffling to me. Have an intern go look through the Wikipedia articles for each one of them.

[0] There's no mention of the in the Baltimore Sun article, but https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/theres-so-man... is dated 2019-01-02.

An age-based criterion for computer knowledge would write off Donald Knuth, while counting a tween that only knew snapchat as an expert. To be honest I'm not sure how useful the list of ages would be.

I think that an age-based criterion would reflect that younger people (on average) have greater tech literacy. But I don't think Congresspeople reflect the general population, so I agree that using age is probably not the best idea.

I've not proposed any sort of cutoff, and don't particularly care about the specific ages. I'm just astounded by the claim that data on the ages of members of Congress isn't readily available to a journalist at a major newspaper.

Of course it's available, given that the birthdates all are. But, to paraphrase Barbie, "Math is hard."

I'm guessing that a quick Google of "116th Congress ages" didn't turn up a single preformatted source in the desired format in the first few links.

Having just spent a bit of time on this today[0], I realized there is one seat (NC district 9) that's still not set due to fraud allegations. Could be that's what they're referring to.

[0] Just threw this together to start playing with hosting using S3: http://howoldiscongress.com/ (Yes, I know that's absurd precision. wip and all.)

This a good article but I would add that quoting a YouTube comment in a serious context also shows a critical lack of understanding of what the internet is and how its content should be regarded. The comment in question could be posted by the author or the subject of discussion without the reader having any way of determining or suspecting that fraud. The same cannot be said of a direct quote. It seems like the author was parsing YouTube comments to get an idea of what the young people who “get it” had to say and that absurd notion stayed with me throughout the article. Unlike the author scrolling through YouTube comments, I was questioning the quality and genuineness of what I was reading.

Doing so later led me to ask: are Senators who know how to text each other the most technologically knowledgeable people in Congress? Is that really good enough to inspire hope in the author?

Senators don't have to know everything just as a CEO does not know everything. But they do have to be capable of hiring competent STAFF to help them!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_staff

In 2000, every Representative hired 14 staff members, while the average Senator hired 34.

In 2000, House committees had an average of 68 staff and Senate committees an average of 46.

Business CEOs don't know everything but they help hire the Chief Financial Officer, the Chief Technology Officer, legal counsel, etc.

If senators can't get a few tech people to advise the senators and committee chairpersons then they deserve to look like fools and be laughed at. It is their job to hire people to help educate and advise them.

Since this is apparently a verbatim repost of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18813468, I'm going to repost my (lightly edited) comment from that empty thread since I think it's a crap article with some serious flaws.

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This is a really disappointing article. I'd like to agree with the premise, but some of the specific examples they chose to use seem a more than a little unfair.

> 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 tenuously related claims about the age of Congress, which in itself plays into avocado-toast tier reporting by generalizations]

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.

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[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/03/facebook-...

[2] https://www.techlicious.com/blog/google-tracking-after-locat...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17749330

Yes, I actually don't see anything in that article that makes me come close to doing a facepalm. Some of the questions aren't the most elegantly worded but I'd be a lot more concerned if someone expressed surprise that users were tracked or data kept or some other naive lack of understanding of how social media and ad networks operate.

>revealed a conception of social media resembling a wad of tangled Christmas lights

That actually seems like a pretty good analogy. I might use it someday.

There's also the sort of smug superiority that one often sees directed at everyone who isn't as immersed in a particular field as the speaker or writer.

The "Internet is a series of tubes" meme from years back was an earlier example of this. The senator was trying to explain the concept of network congestion. Now, his actual argument was garbage (it was an anti-net neutrality argument), and there were things he said that were very funny (like referring to an email as "an Internet"), but the "series of tubes" language was a perfectly reasonable analogy.

People who are deep in a particular area are often very dismissive of metaphors and other simplifications or attempt to explain for a broader audience because they're not "right." But that's often fine if you're trying to get a concept across rather than writing technical documentation.

Other than the use of the word 'apparatus', those quotes don't strike me as "old out-of-touch person who doesn't understand technology" but rather "normal non-technical person who isn't familiar with the jargon". Either of those questions could have easily been asked by the average 30-year-old.

The problem here isn't that members of Congress are old or unfamiliar with technology. It's that these public inquisitions of industry leaders are pretty much entirely a production for the media. The way congressional hearings are run is designed to ensure that every member gets camera time, not to uncover truths.

Putting term limits for Senators is a good way to get rid of this old club and bring new blood. Some senators are there for their life.

It's not clear whether that would produce better outcomes. Some policy areas like healthcare, transportation, and the military are tremendously complex. It takes legislators years just to get up to speed on the issues. Inexperienced legislators have to rely on their staffs and lobbyists for guidance, so if we term out the experienced legislators then in effect we're handing more power to un-elected staffers and lobbyists.

> average age 58 in the House, 62 in the Senate.

This right here is the main issue. The median age in the US is 38. Even if you remove people under 18 which cannot serve in Congress, that would raise the median to ~47.

The constitutional age limitation for serving in Congress is 25 for the House and 30 for the Senate.

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