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>