Opinion: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's visit to the Hill is mostly a PR move


EDITOR'S NOTE: Boris Epshteyn formerly served as a Senior Advisor to the Trump Campaign and served in the White House as Special Assistant to The President and Assistant Communications Director for Surrogate Operations.

WASHINGTON (Sinclair Broadcast Group) - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was on Capitol Hill to talk about concerns that Facebook and other tech giants like Google and Twitter, are taking our information, compiling it and using it to make money.

That should be no surprise. Whether you clicked some button and approved your data being collected or the tech companies did it on their own, all of our online profiles are already unbelievably extensive.

I assume that everything I do online is tracked in some way. All of you should assume the same.

So, is regulation the answer? Zuckerberg has said he is open to being regulated. Of course he is. The government will come up with some general regulations, like when it mandated that warnings be put on cigarette packaging.

The tech companies will comply but then will keep on taking our information in a way that doesn’t break the new laws or regulations.

You better believe that the programmers at these tech companies, like Facebook and Google, are decades ahead of whatever the government can come up with.

Then Facebook and others can say “see, everything we do is fully legal!”

Here is the bottom line: this apology tour from Mark Zuckerberg is a charm and public relations offensive. The only way that tech companies will actually stop infringing on our privacy is if they are forced to do so because their users abandon them if they do not. That is called the power of the free markets.

close video ad
Unmutetoggle ad audio on off