Speaker 1: Zuckerberg gets grilled. I'm Rich Demiro. This is Rich on
Speaker 1: Tech Daily. Well, if you're watching the news at all,
Speaker 1: you saw that Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg talked
Speaker 1: to Congress yesterday and also today, and man was that
Speaker 1: interesting to watch. If you watched any of it, well,
Speaker 1: you realize several things. First off, well, I think our
Speaker 1: lawmakers are a little bit in the dark about how
Speaker 1: the internet works, how Facebook works, how they track us,
Speaker 1: how they make money. But also I think it also
Speaker 1: showed another side of things aside that what these tech
Speaker 1: companies are doing is not always transparent to the average person.
Speaker 1: And I can't knock these guys in Washington for not
Speaker 1: knowing the inner workings of the Internet and how technology works,
Speaker 1: because let's face it, most people don't when you think
Speaker 1: about it. Back in the day, we had newspapers, they
Speaker 1: were a trusted source. If something was published in the
Speaker 1: newspaper or a magazine, well you knew an editor went
Speaker 1: through it. Now with Facebook, people post stories from all
Speaker 1: kinds of sources. You don't really know where they're coming from.
Speaker 1: We have to be the editor at the end of
Speaker 1: the day. And that's a big job for a lot
Speaker 1: of people. Most of us have a normal job. We're
Speaker 1: sitting there working. We don't have time to fact check
Speaker 1: every single article or story or posts that we see,
Speaker 1: so we take it at face value, and as we've seen,
Speaker 1: that has sort of backfired. Let me go through some
Speaker 1: of the remarks that Zuckerberg made and I'll kind of
Speaker 1: comment on some of them. First off, he said, Facebook
Speaker 1: is an idealistic and optimistic company. From our existence, we've
Speaker 1: been focused on all the good that connecting people can do.
Speaker 1: As Facebook has grown, people everywhere have gotten a powerful
Speaker 1: new tool for staying connected to the people they love,
Speaker 1: making their voices heard, and building communities and businesses. All
Speaker 1: of that is very true. So when you think about Facebook,
Speaker 1: I mean, it really is connecting people in new ways,
Speaker 1: connecting people in different ways, in ways that we never
Speaker 1: really really thought of. But as they went down that line,
Speaker 1: we've seen it's been a tough road because we think
Speaker 1: about the ways that Facebook has always been trying to
Speaker 1: connect people, but they've come under a lot of heat
Speaker 1: for the ways that they do that. So these are
Speaker 1: all things that they're learning from. Zuckerberg then goes on
Speaker 1: to say, it's clear now we didn't do enough to
Speaker 1: prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.
Speaker 1: That goes for fake news, foreign interference and elections, hate speech,
Speaker 1: as well as developers and data privacy. And right there
Speaker 1: he's really talking about what happened with Cambridge Analytica. And
Speaker 1: here's the thing. When you're something like Facebook, a large
Speaker 1: organization that's building these tools, you don't necessarily know how
Speaker 1: everyone's going to use them. Now, you might have an
Speaker 1: idea how they're going to be used, but you can't
Speaker 1: figure out every possibility in the world. And I think
Speaker 1: that's what he's saying here. So now Facebook, and since
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen or twenty fifteen, when they change a lot
Speaker 1: of these things, they have done better, and I think
Speaker 1: they will now with the spotlight being on them, continue
Speaker 1: to do better. Zuckerberg goes on to say, it's not
Speaker 1: just enough to connect people. We want to make sure
Speaker 1: those connections are positive. So that's a big one too,
Speaker 1: because this really deals with fake news. And here's the
Speaker 1: thing when it comes to Facebook, they want to spread information.
Speaker 1: It is an amazing place to spread information. If you
Speaker 1: have an announcement, if you ever had a kid, you
Speaker 1: put a birth announcement on there, or you say you're
Speaker 1: going to the hospital. It's amazing all the people that
Speaker 1: come out of the woodwork to offer you congratulations or
Speaker 1: to give you some information, or if you're traveling somewhere,
Speaker 1: you know how people can tell you, oh, I've been
Speaker 1: to that place. You can't possibly pull every single one
Speaker 1: of your friends and say, hey, have you been to France?
Speaker 1: Tell me the best restaurants. But on Facebook you can
Speaker 1: do that. And so again they're saying here that there
Speaker 1: are tools that really do connect people, but you have
Speaker 1: to make sure that they're not used to spread misinformation.
Speaker 1: And that's a tough thing to do because Facebook can't
Speaker 1: fact check everything that's posted to their site, but they
Speaker 1: can create some tools that let them figure out what's
Speaker 1: good and what's bad. Zuckerberg goes on to say, I
Speaker 1: believe deeply in what we're doing, and I know that
Speaker 1: when we address these challenges, we'll look back and view
Speaker 1: helping people and connecting and giving people voice as a
Speaker 1: positive force in the world. I remember when I first
Speaker 1: got my access to Facebook. It was such an honor.
Speaker 1: I mean, I remember I used my alumni email address
Speaker 1: to get access to the website, because you had to
Speaker 1: have an edu email address to get access to Facebook
Speaker 1: back in the day, and when I did that, it
Speaker 1: was like a whole new world had been unlocked to me,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people thought that way, and we've
Speaker 1: gotten away from that. Now we take Facebook for granted,
Speaker 1: but the reality is it has done a lot of
Speaker 1: good for people. But at the same time, it has
Speaker 1: become a huge force in our lives, and Facebook needs
Speaker 1: to know that. They need to be cognizant of the
Speaker 1: strength that they have and of the power that they have.
Speaker 1: And that's part of this learning situation. By the way,
Speaker 1: So what's the point about all this tracking? Why do
Speaker 1: these companies want to track us so badly? It all
Speaker 1: comes down to one thing money. I've said this before.
Speaker 1: They want to sell us stuff, whether it's Facebook selling ads,
Speaker 1: whether it's Google selling ads, whether it's Target getting us
Speaker 1: into their store to buy stuff. The more that they
Speaker 1: know about us, the easier it is to sell us stuff.
Speaker 1: And the more that companies know about us, the better
Speaker 1: it is for advertisers who want to target us. And
Speaker 1: that's really what's going on here. So when you think
Speaker 1: about Facebook, what they're doing is they're trying to collect
Speaker 1: as much data on us as possible because that way
Speaker 1: marketers can sell us stuff in an easy way. If
Speaker 1: you're on Facebook back in the early days, you would
Speaker 1: see a bunch of ads in your news feed, and
Speaker 1: the biggest complaint about those ads on the side was
Speaker 1: that they meant nothing to you. They'd be for products
Speaker 1: that you just didn't care about. Well, now, obviously Facebook
Speaker 1: has gotten really good at targeting us, so a lot
Speaker 1: of the ads you see are for products that a
Speaker 1: lot of people say, Oh, I was just thinking about
Speaker 1: that product, or I search for that product. Same thing
Speaker 1: with Instagram, same thing with pretty much any website that
Speaker 1: uses Google Ads or any sort of online major online
Speaker 1: ad provider. In reality, this is kind of a good
Speaker 1: thing for us because think about it, it's bad for
Speaker 1: your wallet because you're probably going to spend more money,
Speaker 1: but it's a good thing because you're interested in the
Speaker 1: products that you see, or you could be interested in
Speaker 1: the products you see back in the day. Let's just
Speaker 1: use the hypothetical of watching a national telecast, right, so
Speaker 1: millions of people would be watching that show. You'd probably
Speaker 1: see an ad for a really broad product like Colgate toothpaste.
Speaker 1: Millions of people would see that ad. It would build
Speaker 1: brand awareness. Yes, maybe a percentage of those people would
Speaker 1: purchase it. Now we're getting highly targeted ads for products
Speaker 1: that we may like, that we may be interested in
Speaker 1: for the time period in our lives. And this is
Speaker 1: really nothing new. It just happens to be on the Internet.
Speaker 1: So it's much more optimized. Think about when you went
Speaker 1: to the mall. You saw that big shiny car in
Speaker 1: the center of the mall that you can win. Well,
Speaker 1: guess what it wasn't just hey, let's just pick someone
Speaker 1: out of a raffle, No, it was fill out this
Speaker 1: card that asked you everything, where you live, how much
Speaker 1: you make, what your email address is, what your cell
Speaker 1: phone number is. Well, they're given away that car that
Speaker 1: might cost thirty thousand dollars, but they're gathering thousands of
Speaker 1: dollars worth of data on the individuals that enter the raffle.
Speaker 1: I Guess what happens to that information? It's all sold
Speaker 1: and resold to marketers, and that's what it's all about.
Speaker 1: So this has been going on from the beginning of time.
Speaker 1: It's just that companies like Facebook and Google have gotten
Speaker 1: extremely good at it. Overall, putting all this stuff on
Speaker 1: TV and having this all come to light is a
Speaker 1: good thing for all of us, because tech companies in
Speaker 1: general are now going to realize that they can't get
Speaker 1: away with all the crazy stuff that they might have
Speaker 1: been able to get away with in the past. There
Speaker 1: you have it. Thanks so much for listening, rich Demiro
Speaker 1: rich on tech dot TV. Tell me what you think.
Speaker 1: You can tweet me on Twitter or on Facebook as well.
Speaker 1: I know you're still on there because I am so
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening. I'll talk to you real soon.