He is a programmer who majored in psychology
Not a full graduate, but he can program, I won't dispute his interests (the Jarvis project is pretty nice). Nevertheless, he is a CEO for 16 years now, so first and
foremost he is in this position.
Yes, he does answer as any lawyer would, pretty sure he extensively trained with his lawyers to go through this ordeal and wariness on the process.
But set that aside, these are moral discussions on a market segment (social information) in which he/his company plays a major role in. The senator is pressuring him into the providing the list of entities, yes, but he asked this specifically with nuance:
- We could off course impede this information
- When a Facebook employee accesses private information, is a record made?
- Does it trigger an audit?
- Will you commit in giving us a list of the number of times Facebook employees have accessed the information of the users without their knowledge?
These are serious legal concerns.
I still don't get it that people are that open with their privacy on platforms like Facebook. The reasoning of "well you agreed to it, you just have to be careful with what you post online" is bullshit. No, you are giving away your rights on digital privacy the moment you agree on the agreement given by Facebook, be aware of that, few people properly are. This is not just Facebook's domain, this is all digital media which is in contact with Facebook's services/api's/online presence. Shadow profiling, etc. The clip above even shows a part of it.
Compare it to this, you are given a house to live in, however this house has camcorders and audio recorders spread everywhere. For marketing purposes.
It won't be used actively but an employee of Facebook, the owner, has the right to go over all recordings in your home and analyse it. Additionally parts of your recordings can be cherry picked and distributed around to 3rd parties for the sense of marketing data and the data will be kept as long as we want to. Additionally, we'll filter out what will be shown on the television and your pc monitor. Oh and there are detectives around the house that stalk your activities. Oh and we'll keep a check on who you know and how much you talk with them. So, would you agree to live in it? You just have to click yes. It's free.
As for engineering, I work in IT Infrastructure in the Healthcare sector (Hospital systems), so the company I work for works with confidential data and entities like the FDA, so I am aware of the sensitivity on (patient) information.