> 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?”<p>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.<p>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).
> We don’t yet have comprehensive age data for the next Congress<p>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.<p>[0] There's no mention of the in the Baltimore Sun article, but <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/theres-so-many-different-things-how-technology-baffled-an-elderly-congress-in-2018/2019/01/02/f583f368-ffe0-11e8-83c0-b06139e540e5_story.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/theres-so-man...</a> is dated 2019-01-02.
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.<p>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!<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_staff" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_staff</a><p>In 2000, every Representative hired 14 staff members, while the average Senator hired 34.<p>In 2000, House committees had an average of 68 staff and Senate committees an average of 46.<p>Business CEOs don't know everything but they help hire the Chief Financial Officer, the Chief Technology Officer, legal counsel, etc.<p>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 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18813468" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18813468</a>, 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.<p>---<p>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.<p>> 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?”<p>Yeah, sure, the phrasing is not great, but interpreted charitably there's a decent question in there:<p>> 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?<p>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.<p>> 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!”<p>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.<p>So, again, actually a pretty reasonable question that hits close to a lot of fevered discussion in our circles[3].<p>This strikes me as, ironically enough, a technically illiterate reporter trawling for bad-sounding Twitter-length excerpts while ignoring any of the underlying issues.<p>At least the article goes on to quote Hatch's communications director:<p>> “Perhaps one part of the problem is Congress-illiteracy among tech reporters.”<p>> Maybe so. [continues to address tenuously related claims about the age of Congress, which in itself plays into avocado-toast tier reporting by generalizations]<p>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.<p>---<p>[1] <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/03/facebook-track-browsing-history-california-lawsuit" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/03/facebook-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.techlicious.com/blog/google-tracking-after-location-history-turned-off/" rel="nofollow">https://www.techlicious.com/blog/google-tracking-after-locat...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17749330" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17749330</a>
> average age 58 in the House, 62 in the Senate.<p>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.