[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 57 (Tuesday, April 10, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2025-S2026]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Online Privacy

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, today we have a joint Commerce and 
Judiciary Committee hearing on online privacy and the abuse of data 
obtained by social media platforms. Ordinarily, I wouldn't come to the 
Senate floor to talk about an individual legislative hearing, but this 
is no run-of-the-mill event. The CEO of Facebook will be testifying, 
and I believe his company and other parties have some important 
explaining to do.
  One question is what Facebook's priorities are and whether they are 
what they should be. Facebook, of course, is a publicly traded company, 
and it has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders that it shares in 
common with every other shareholder-owned enterprise. Its business 
model is unique. It collects information on billions of people and uses 
that data to help drive its profits. One wonders whether, and at what 
point, that profit motive has come to be at odds with protecting the 
privacy of individual users. To me, that is one of the fundamental 
questions Mr. Zuckerberg is going to have to answer today.
  From testimony released yesterday, we know Facebook will admit it 
made mistakes; that it didn't take a broad enough view of its 
responsibility and prevent its tools from being used in ways that it 
says it did not intend. That act of contrition is one we all welcome, 
of course, but it will not matter much without additional action, some 
of which might be even foundational to Facebook's entire business 
model.
  Those changes, we are told, can take some time. Meanwhile, Americans 
will continue to wonder about their privacy, about who is acquiring 
data about their political opinions, their personal taste, and their 
preferences without their informed consent.
  How much have any of us read of the terms of service for the social 
media platforms that we use? They are written by lawyers for legal 
purposes, which is basically to prevent any lawsuits from being 
successfully filed against the company. Yet, in terms of informed 
consent, which is what we ought to be focused on here, how much do 
consumers really understand about how the data is used that they turn 
over to these social media platforms?
  Mr. Zuckerberg has an opportunity today to explain whether consumers 
are really being protected in any meaningful way. It is good that 
Facebook has, in recent months, shut down accounts that have had links 
to the Russian Government--accounts that were used to meddle in our 
last election. That is surely one actor we know who has used Facebook 
in improper ways, but it never should have reached that point. The 
company should have spotted this attempt of foreign influence much 
earlier and contained its spread.
  In our moving forward, now is the time to demand a comprehensive 
accounting of internal monitoring efforts as well as the full extent of 
the infiltration and manipulation of that and other social media 
platforms in the past, not just by Russia but by other foreign actors, 
including rogue actors.
  In addition to its response to the Russia allegations, Facebook, we 
have been told, has limited which online apps can literally vacuum up 
information from users' profiles. Once again, this announcement only 
tells us so much. We need to understand which apps are still being 
allowed to mine that data and under what conditions.
  We have all heard about one egregious case of this happening--a 
political consulting firm, using Facebook, that improperly accessed the 
private data of some 87 million users. This data was used to assemble a 
psychological

[[Page S2026]]

profile to assess how people might respond to political advertising and 
how they might vote in an election. When people access Facebook to 
trade pictures with families and friends or to communicate with family 
and talk about their most recent vacations, I doubt they realize that 
data could be acquired by a third party, like Cambridge Analytica, and 
that it can not only literally use that information but all of the 
personal data of their friends and relatives in order to target 
political messaging for its use in an election.
  Facebook has historically been a platform for all ideas, as they say, 
but now the company realizes that because of its business model, it has 
more responsibilities. It is not just a neutral platform. It must 
defend against false information, foreign government subterfuge, and 
other destructive conduct, such as child pornography and human 
trafficking. We know, as a result of the most recent legislation we 
passed relative to human trafficking, that we have actually expanded 
the responsibilities of social media platforms in the human trafficking 
arena because of the threat it poses to so many innocent people.
  The basic questions are whether Facebook is responsible for 
misinformation in its use of its platform, for outright falsehoods, or 
attempts by foreign governments to meddle in our elections by sowing 
discord and disinformation. There are also some important questions 
about whether Facebook is inconsistently using the data that it 
collects in a way that obviously benefits itself financially but is not 
sharing it on an equal basis with law enforcement or intelligence when 
the intelligence community needs that information to solve crimes or to 
keep the country safe.
  A lot of ideas have been tossed around about how to respond to these 
difficult questions. Perhaps we should treat social media platforms as 
information fiduciaries and impose legal obligations on them, as we do 
with lawyers and doctors, who are privy to some of our most personal, 
private information.
  To me, one of the most important questions is who owns that data that 
we share on social media platforms and whether the data that is shared 
is shared with one's fully informed consent so that consumers are 
protected against consequences they had no way of anticipating and that 
are damaging to their personal privacy.
  Other ideas involve increased transparency, partnering with the 
Federal Trade Commission, or passing new data privacy laws. They 
involve giving consumers more control and requiring companies to 
disclose in plain English and in nontechnical ways what information 
they collect before users are presumed to have given their consent. I 
look forward to exploring these and other related ideas at the hearing 
later today.
  Facebook and other social media platforms need to come clean with the 
American people. An apology, while necessary and welcome, is not 
enough. These companies must back up their words with actions that 
better safeguard the American consumer and their right to privacy. 
Technology can be a good thing, but it can also be abused in ways that 
we need to reckon with. This afternoon's hearing will be the beginning 
of those efforts in a very substantial and comprehensive way.
  Mr. President, on a separate matter, we have a lot on our plate here 
in the Senate apart from conducting the hearing that I just mentioned. 
One of our items on our ``to do'' list is to continue to confirm the 
President's nominees, who have faced an unprecedented level of 
obstruction from the minority. The majority leader, Senator McConnell, 
has been forced to file cloture--a formal piece of paper--on six 
important nominees, many of whom will be confirmed with strong 
bipartisan support, but because our colleagues on the other side refuse 
to consent to the expedited consideration of these noncontroversial 
nominees, we will have to literally burn up a week of the Senate's time 
during which we could be doing other important work.