Saturday, February 5, 2011

mark zuckerberg congress letter

Mark Zuckerberg Gets Another Letter from Congress
Congress, having discovered Facebook last year, can't get enough of asking Mark Zuckerberg questions about its privacy policies. They just sent him a letter grilling him about Facebook's plan to give third-party developers access to more user data.
The first letter from the House Bipartisan Privacy Caucus asked about Facebook leaking identifiable user information to third-party apps. Now, information has reached Washington via telegraph about the weeks-old announcement that Facebook wanted to let app developers access user phone numbers, and congressmen Edward J. Markey and Joe Barton have some questions about this.
The letter asks all sorts of useful questions about the plan, like how, exactly will it work, and how will Facebook ensure nobody steals our kids' cell phone numbers and then sexts and cyberbully them. (Paraphrasing here.) But Facebook's already suspended the plan ("We are making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so," is all they will say.) Congress, usually so cutting-edge when it comes to body-surfing waves of outrage, is uncharacteristically late to the game on this one. Markey should start checking his Twitter more often, after he sends them a sternly-worded letter, too.

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