This was obviously never going to happen and is absolutely the right decision for Zuckerberg and Facebook. House of Commons select committees bagging a big scalp invariably turn into show trials, with MPs possessing a completely deluded sense of their own insight into a subject queuing up to play to the cameras. The spectacle of having Zuckerberg there would have been absolutely excruciating.<p>So, much as I'd like to see Facebook deleted from the internet, at least we'll be spared the embarrassment of the world witnessing the caliber of our elected representatives.
Facebooks PR seems all over the place. It seems to go like this:<p>1) Blame users/say it wasn't as bad/not a breach<p>2) Controversy gets worse<p>3) Apologise, say we got it wrong, working on it<p>I think this is especially dumb as FB took out a personally-signed-by-Zuckerberg letter in 6 UK sunday papers last weekend. It looks very fake.
No representation without taxation.<p>Why should Facebook send Zuckerberg when Facebook paid a grand total of £2.6 million taxes to the UK in 2017.<p>If the British parliament wants Zuckerberg to attend, make the UK relevant to Facebook. Tax it.<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/04/facebook-uk-corporation-tax-profit" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/04/facebook-...</a>
It feels like Zuck is in panic and listening too much to his PR advisors who are likely telling him to stay out of the public until the storm settles. Not a smart move on this particular case
Wrong time to chicken out. That will probably have serious consequences for FB in Europe and will help with convincing people to regulations like revenue-based taxation.
As someone from the UK I am not at all surprised, there is no upside to him doing so. There is nothing he can say that will help, the committee will absolutely rip into him as their primary audience is the press and people of the UK, they don't really care about his answers to their questions.
The problem is that the story isn't about FB making mistakes, or being hacked, or doing something they said they wouldn't. It's that people are working out what it is they've agreed to to use the service, and there is no spinning that.
Saying this is a strategic mistake may be a bit too early to tell. It depends on whether this issue will slowly disappear in the media and minds of people (like most things). He has no legal obligation to appear if I understand correctly. The select committee mainly consists of MPs who objected Brexit. Of course they try to make their point that the vote was skewed or manipulated. If, on the other hand, the pressure stays on, it may very well be a strategic mistake not to appear.
I said it in a previous post but if the congress/senate were allowed to summon Tony Hayward, BP CEO, over the Deep Water Horizon disaster then the UK Parliament are well in their rights to summon, and expect attendance, of Zukerberg over this.
Not a complete surprise, but I suspect this is a strategic mistake from Zuckerberg. It's going to send the wrong message, at a time when Facebook is already under pressure and regulators in the EU are about to be given the most powerful privacy tools (and the most heavy penalty regime) they've ever had to work with.
I wonder if this will affect their tax arrangements, as they have been treated rather nicely up till now.<p>In 2014, Facebook paid £4,327 in tax to the UK. The next year, they paid £4.16 million, which seems to be an improvement but then in the same year they were given an £11 million tax credit, so not so much.
> "You have a wealthy company from a developed nation going into an economy or democracy that's still struggling to get its feet on the ground - and taking advantage of that to profit from that," he told MPs.<p>Christopher Wylie (ex-Facebook whistleblower) just gave the primary reason why Facebook is blocked in China.
Can one of the mods explain the dramatic killing of <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16687588" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16687588</a> its a perfectly valid discussion with an article by a reasonable publication?
Mark was <i>invited</i> and he declined. What's really wrong with that?<p>His wisdom and personal belief (including legal and lawyer suggestions) tells him that coming over to the invitation would not do him (nor his company) any good.<p>And, given with all the information he has supposedly with people, he may already have some knowledge of the personality of the MPs who are going to grill him that he may think otherwise that appearing before them would tantamount into a gong show.
This is the ultimate act of Silicon Valley arrogance, at it will backfire hard.<p>Not just on Facebook, and not just in the UK. This crosses a line all democratic nations in which SV companies have significant interests and even more significant influence will take note of.<p>SV and apparently large parts of HN are completely delusional if they think this won't have serious consequences.
Aside from everything, I find it remarkable that the media are gunning for facebook right now (referencing all those shady algorithms / shady partnerships etc etc) to the extent that facebook is a 'dirty word' and yet the newspapers are evidently quite happy to accept payment for full page ads in their publications from ... facebook.
What happens if someone decided to commit a crime using SaaS platform, then requests data to be deleted. Police then go to SaaS provider and such provider can't give any data. Is SaaS provider going to be blamed?
I hope this hate on FB ends already, I'm tired of seeing the home page of HN polluted by it.<p>We all knew what was going on on FB, so acting surprised is silly. And we all know this won't change nothing because most people don't care and will happily keep using FB. And we also know even if people stop using FB they will keep using WA/IG. So what's the point? Is this only a problem now that Trump took advantage of it?
No matter how much of a mistake Facebook make with their PR, they're gonna get away with it.<p>Primarily because a majority of the public can't sustain their interest in the subject beyond their day-to-day concerns in life.<p>I mean the whole argument here is that stolen user data from Facebook led a marketing agency to enable a political party with a certain agenda to deceive the public and win a democratic vote. Gathering so much power is a big victory in the first place, that is not so easy to ignore / forget / undo very easily, especially when most people continue to use Facebook products the way they did because the news slowly becomes old and people forget and move on.<p>This subject is bigger than Facebook, it reveals shortcomings of a democratic vote and how power in the capitalist system can render a democracy to be an illusion. Facebook's victory is to have accumulated so much power in the first place. Power aka most personal user data any institute has ever gathered. Never mind they used shady sly tactics to take permissions in the first place.