Sure Looks Like Facebook’s Lead Attorney Lied to Congress While Under Oath
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Sure Looks
Like Facebook’s Lead Attorney Colin Stretch Lied to Congress While Under Oath
by Colin Kalmbacher | 6:15 pm, May 5th, 2018
Facebook’s general counsel Colin Stretch may have not been completely truthful
while under oath when taking questions in front of the Senate Judiciary
Committee on October 31, 2017.
Stretch
was being grilled by Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) about the extent of
Facebook’s ability to profile users on the social media website. Stretch
told Kennedy that Facebook had done away with the ability of employees to
compile or access profiles on individual users. Here’s a transcript of
their relevant remarks:
Sen. Kennedy: Do you have a profile on me?
Stretch: Senator, if you’re a Facebook user, we would permit you
to be targeted with an advertisement based on your characteristics and your
likes along with other people who share similar characteristics and your likes
along with other people who share–
Sen. Kennedy: Well, let’s do another one. Let’s suppose your CEO came
to you, or not you, somebody who could do it in your company, maybe you could,
and said, “I want to know everything we can know about Senator Graham. I want
to know the movies he likes. I want to know the bars he goes to. I want to know
who his friends are. I want to know what schools he went to.” You could do
that, couldn’t you?
Stretch:
So, I want to be—it is a very good question—the answer is absolutely not. We
have limitations in place on our ability to review the person’s—
Sen. Kennedy: I’m not asking about your rules. I’m
saying, you have the ability to do that, don’t you?
Stretch: Again, Senator, the answer is no. We’re not able—
Sen. Kennedy: You can’t put a name to a face to a piece of
data? You’re telling me that?
Stretch: So we have designed our systems to prevent
exactly that, to protect the privacy of our users.
Sen. Kennedy: I understand, but you can get around that to
find that identity, can’t you?
Stretch: No senator, I cannot.
Sen. Kennedy: That’s your testimony under oath?
Stretch: Yes, it is.
Stretch’s
assuredness puzzled many observers at the time. Others called
Stretch out for those allegedly misleading comments. Even Vanity Fair wrote approvingly of Kennedy’s intensive questioning of
Stretch. Now, it appears Stretch’s critics were correct in their estimation
of his allegedly evasive comments.
A small group of Facebook
Inc. employees have permission to access users’ profiles without the users
finding out.
Yet any time a
Facebook employee accesses a colleague’s personal profile, the colleague is
notified through what is often referred to within the company as a Sauron
alert—a reference to the all-seeing eye in the The Lord of the Rings trilogy,
people familiar with the matter say.
Similar protections
don’t exist for the two billion-plus Facebook users who don’t work for the
company, the people said.
Law&Crime reached out to Facebook for comment on this
story. This space will be updated if and when a response is received.
Congressional
perjury can result in up to five years in prison. Such
prosecutions, however, are exceedingly unlikely in the United States.
Watch the full clip of the Kennedy-Stretch
discussion courtesy of Facebook and C-SPAN above.
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