Zuckerberg Plays Coy With Senators

By External Source

SEN. RICHARD J. DURBIN (D-ILL):

Mr. Zuckerberg, would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?

ZUCKERBERG: No.

(LAUGHTER)

DURBIN: If you messaged anybody this week, would you share with us the names of the people you've messaged?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, no. I would probably not choose to do that publicly, here.

DURBIN: I think that may be what this is all about: your right to privacy, the limits of your right to privacy and how much you give away in modern America in the name of, quote, “connecting people around the world;” a question, basically, of what information Facebook's collecting, who they're sending it to and whether they ever asked me, in advance, my permission to do that. Is that a fair thing for the user of Facebook to expect?

ZUCKERBERG: Yes, senator. I think everyone should have control over how their information is used. And as we've talked about in some of the other questions, I think that is laid out in and some of the documents, but more importantly, you want your people control in the product itself.

So the most important way that this happens across our services is that every day, people come to our services to choose to share photos or send messages, and every single time they choose to share something, there — they have a control right there about who they want to share it with. But that level of control is extremely important.

– Excerpted from Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate hearing, The Washington Post