Brightbridge Wealth Management Headlines Facebook executive takes heat in hearing on privacy

Reporting from Washington-

A top senator, angry that Facebook Inc. failed to quit millions of preteens from making use of its social networking internet site, accused co-founder Mark Zuckerberg of lacking “social values” and becoming far more concerned with creating the firm than with children’s privacy.

“It really is my common feeling that folks who are 20, 21, 22 years old actually don’t have any social values at this point,” Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) told one more top Facebook executive at a hearing Thursday.

“I feel he was focused on how the organization model would function,” Rockefeller stated about Zuckerberg, who was a 19-year-old Harvard student when he designed Facebook in 2004. “He wanted to make it bigger and faster and greater than anybody else ever had.”

The company’s policy calls for users to be at least 13, a move developed to steer clear of federal regulations for sites employed by young children. But a current Consumer Reports survey identified that about 7.5 million active Facebook users were younger than 13.

Rockefeller’s comments came as a Facebook executive for the initial time came below congressional quizzing in a current round of hearings about concerns that technologies businesses are not protecting individual privacy. Executives from Apple Inc. and Google Inc., which sent witnesses to a hearing last week, also appeared at Thursday’s hearing before a Commerce subcommittee.

Rockefeller, a crucial player on technology concerns, and other lawmakers are thinking about new regulations to defend on-line privacy, particularly for children. The problem has gained momentum with the current revelation that an obscure file on iPhones and iPads could shop thousands of detailed records of a user’s whereabouts.

Rockefeller mentioned he was lately told by Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg that the firm has only 100 people monitoring the posts and other activities of about 600 million users.

“My reaction to that is that is just definitely indefensible,” Rockefeller told Facebook Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor, saying he was worried about kids getting targeted by sexual predators and on-line bullies. “I want you to defend your business here since I do not know how you can.”

Taylor stated Facebook shuts down the accounts of people found to be lying about their age to stay away from the company’s restriction.

“We do not allow people to misrepresent their age,” Taylor said.

But he admitted Facebook depended on other users to report such violations to enforce the policy.

The under-age dilemma at Facebook showed that massive technology organizations have not made privacy a top priority, stated Amy Guggenheim Shenkan, president of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit kids and family advocacy group.

Such hugely effective innovators should be in a position to generate approaches to better shield children’s privacy, Shenkan said. She then took a swipe at Facebook for hiring a high-powered public-relations firm to push news organizations to write unfavorable stories about privacy concerns at Google.

“Instead of spending funds to – employ PR firms to try and take down the other organization, let’s take that money and devote it on figuring out technological techniques that will shield our youngsters,” she told the subcommittee. “It cannot be 100 individuals sitting in a Facebook office trying to monitor 600 million conversations.”

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who has introduced bipartisan legislation to avoid the misuse of sensitive consumer details, mentioned that privacy protection is not “the enemy of innovation.”

“Firms collecting people’s data, whether you’re a tech titan or not, ought to comply with a simple code of conduct,” Kerry said.

But Taylor warned that new privacy restrictions could squelch Facebook and other social networks.

Facebook tries to safeguard privacy by letting users choose which info they share, he mentioned. But Taylor cautioned that several men and women want to share their photographs and other particulars of their lives to get the most out of social networks, and Facebook doesn’t want to assume that all its users want to put a vault around their information.

“We realize that trust is a foundation of the social Web. Men and women will quit employing Facebook if they lose trust in our services,” he stated. “At the very same time, overly restrictive policies can interfere with the public’s demand for new and innovative methods to interact.”

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