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.

Why Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is winning the US Senate hearings

The social-media giant's economic model emerged unscathed despite hours of questions from senators

Mark Zuckerberg did just fine in his first turn in the Congressional hot seat. He was confident. He capably tackled many of the queries proposed last week by Bloomberg columnists. The 33-year-old billionaire appeared humble throughout much of the hearing, with only a few smug smiles.

The best news for Facebook Inc. the company was that Zuckerberg ably deflected any challenges to the beating heart of its economic model: its hungry data collection and the fine-tuned targeted advertising based on that data. Zuckerberg's success is a win for anyone primarily concerned with the company's market value. But it's a loss for the rest of us.

Facebook will keep failing users' trust as long as its business is based on unrestrained hoovering of as much user data as possible, and crafting ever-more innovative ways for advertisers to harness that information for commercial goals. It's an arrangement to which Facebook's users agree and can sidestep, technically, but it is hardly informed consent or a real option to avoid.

This inherent conflict was on display during two of Zuckerberg's exchanges on Tuesday. The first was with Senator Roy Blunt, the Republican from Missouri. He asked Zuckerberg a series of questions about what information the company can collect on its 2 billion users and use for advertising, including whether the social network can pinpoint that a person who posts on Facebook from his work computer in the morning is the same person who uploads a photo to his Facebook smartphone app at night.

The answer, as Zuckerberg surely knows, is yes. Facebook brags to advertisers that it can provide "cross-device" targeting, as it is called. The company can also track people nearly everywhere they go online, and it can see what apps people have installed on their phones.

Facebook also collects information on "offline" activity, as Blunt also asked, which includes information on users' location as they roam around the real world. Companies can also match their information on what your purchase in stores -- that box of cereal at the supermarket, for example -- and marry it with Facebook account information. Inexplicably, Zuckerberg tried to say he wasn't completely sure about Facebook's data collection policies, and one of his underlings could follow up later. The Facebook CEO knows what his company does, but perhaps he couldn't acknowledge that his companies relies on assembling detailed dossiers on billions of people.

This exchange mattered because Blunt and others revealed the flaw in Facebook's bargain with users. The company gives us a service we find valuable, and in exchange, we agree that Facebook will harness that information to make money. Zuckerberg said everyone who uses Facebook consents to what they agree to share and has complete control of it. The trick is few people really understand what they're giving, or are capable of truly controlling it. Zuckerberg seemed to concede as much after a lawmaker brandished a stack of papers said to be Facebook's data collection and ad policy disclosures to its users.

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