Brightbridge Wealth Management Headlines: Facebook executive takes heat in hearing on privacy

http://www.your-story.org/brightbridge-wealth-management-headlines-facebook-executive-takes-heat-in-hearing-on-privacy-244771/

A leading senator, angry that Facebook Inc. failed to stop millions of preteens from using its social networking site, accused co-founder Mark Zuckerberg of lacking “social values” and being more concerned with building the company than with children’s privacy.
“It’s my general feeling that people who are 20, 21, 22 years old really don’t have any social values at this point,” Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) told another top Facebook executive at a hearing Thursday.
“I think he was focused on how the business model would work,” Rockefeller said about Zuckerberg, who was a 19-year-old Harvard student when he created Facebook in 2004. “He wanted to make it bigger and faster and better than anybody else ever had.”
The company’s policy requires users to be at least 13, a move designed to avoid federal regulations for websites used by young children. But a recent Consumer Reports survey found that about 7.5 million active Facebook users were younger than 13.
Rockefeller’s comments came as a Facebook executive for the first time came under congressional quizzing in a recent round of hearings about concerns that technology companies are not protecting personal privacy. Executives from Apple Inc. and Google Inc., which sent witnesses to a hearing last week, also appeared at Thursday’s hearing before a Commerce subcommittee.
Rockefeller, a key player on technology issues, and other lawmakers are considering new regulations to protect online privacy, particularly for children. The issue has gained momentum with the recent revelation that an obscure file on iPhones and iPads could store thousands of detailed records of a user’s whereabouts.
Rockefeller said he was recently told by Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg that the company has only 100 people monitoring the posts and other activities of about 600 million users.
“My reaction to that is that’s just absolutely indefensible,” Rockefeller told Facebook Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor, saying he was worried about children being targeted by sexual predators and online bullies. “I want you to defend your company here because I don’t know how you can.”
Taylor said Facebook shuts down the accounts of people found to be lying about their age to avoid the company’s restriction.
“We don’t allow people to misrepresent their age,” Taylor said.
But he admitted Facebook depended on other users to report such violations to enforce the policy.
The under-age problem at Facebook showed that big technology companies have not made privacy a top priority, said Amy Guggenheim Shenkan, president of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit children and family advocacy group.
Such hugely successful innovators should be able to create ways to better protect children’s privacy, Shenkan said. She then took a swipe at Facebook for hiring a high-powered public-relations firm to push news organizations to write negative stories about privacy issues at Google.