Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced a second day of grilling on Wednesday as USA lawmakers tried to figure out their next step in the wake of the social media giant's most recent privacy scandal.
Zuckerberg told legislators Wednesday that he was among the millions of Facebook users whose data was sold to third parties, but he did not say whether his information was swept up by Cambridge Analytica.
Zuckerberg faced tougher questions from House lawmakers over Facebook's stance than during Tuesday's five-hour session in the Senate, where his defense of data sharing was weakly challenged.
"How can consumers have control over their data when Facebook does not have control over the data?" asked Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the ranking Democrat on the committee, at the beginning of the hearing. If individuals truly want to protect themselves from data mining, they need to start with their own profiles and restrict the amount of personal info they broadcast to the public by checking their privacy settings - yes, they've likely changed since the last time you looked.
"There is absolutely no directive to put a bias into anything we do", Zuckerberg said in response to a question by Rep. Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana, about whether Facebook's algorithms have bias built in.
It's well known that Facebook collects a voluminous amount of data on its 2.2 billion users - but CEO Mark Zuckerberg could not confirm exactly how much the social network collects.
Facebook is now embroiled in a controversy with Cambridge Analytica, which was linked to the Trump campaign in the 2016 presidential election.
"I think we have capacity in 30 languages that we are working on and in addition to that, we have a number of AI (artificial intelligence) tools that we are developing ... that can proactively go flag the content", he said.
Facebook also targets non-users with ads, even if they never consented to the practice.
According to the company, Facebook has records of how data was compromised as far as 2014.
On April 10 this week, as you all know, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, has testified before Congress. Facebook users who downloaded an app developed by Cambridge University psychology professor Aleksandr Kogan gave personal data to the firm - as well as information from their Facebook friends who had not downloaded the app.
"I do imagine that we will find some apps that were either doing something suspicious or misusing people's data", he said.
Facebook has now confirmed it is planning to roll out an "unsend" button that will offer similar functionality to all users on the platform.
On Tuesday Facebook began notifying more than 87 million people around the world, including one million Britons, that their private information may have been given to Cambridge Analytica by an app developer from Cambridge University.
"The GDPR requires us to do a few more things and we are going to extend that to the world", he said.
On Tuesday the social media tycoon took questions from the US Senate for almost five hours, but resisted repeated efforts to get him to support new regulation.
With a slight hesitation, Mr Zuckerberg replied: "Yes".
House members' questions focused on what they said appeared to be Facebook's failure to regulate itself, which could mean further controls by the state.
Facebook uses the data you provide, such as where you live and how old you are, and combines it with geographic information from your phone to tailor ads to a certain audience.
