Pichai says ‘Google cares’, Bezos ‘can’t remember’ in Congressional hearing

Sundar Pichai squirms when asked whether he signed off on the company’s 2016 decision to merge data from the advertising company Double Click

Four big tech CEOs — Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai of Google and Tim Cook of Apple — pushed back against accusations during a US Congress panel hearing capping a yearlong investigation into these companies’ market domination online. Amid intense grilling on issues that centred on market power derived from uninhibited collection and access to data, all four CEOs focused their attention on the value of their innovations and services to consumers. They testified via video link to lawmakers in Washington, DC.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai struggled to deflect accusations of anti-conservative bias and retreated multiple times to a “Happy to engage with you” answer in response to questions that went deep into the working of the company’s mighty algorithms. Pichai squirmed when asked whether he signed off on the company’s 2016 decision to merge data from the advertising company Double Click — bought in 2007 — with Google’s own data. Rep. Val Demings described this move as one that effectively “destroyed users’ anonymity” on the internet.

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“I reviewed at a high level all the important decisions we make,” Pichai said. He talked up how Google “cares” about privacy and security of users and noted that Google no longer uses data from Gmail for ad targeting, a relatively recent change. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos repeatedly offered “I don’t remember” or “We are looking into it” as an answer to lawmaker concerns about how the company might be killing off small businesses, poaching ideas from competitors or employee testimony that there is “nobody enforcing” policies in a company that has become a “candy shop” of seller data.