GOP senator to Zuckerberg: ‘Your user agreement sucks’

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) on Tuesday didn’t mince words with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg when it came to the company’s user agreement, which the senator argued was too complicated for the average American to understand.

“Here’s what everybody’s been trying to tell you today, and I say this gently,” Kennedy told Zuckerberg in the fifth hour of a marathon hearing on Capitol Hill.

“Your user agreement sucks. The purpose of that user agreement is to cover Facebook’s rear end, it’s not to inform users of their rights,” Kennedy said.

The senator also warned Zuckerberg that he’d impose stricter regulations on the company if it didn’t change some of its policies.

“I don’t want to vote to have to regulate Facebook, but by God I will. A lot of that depends on you,” Kennedy told Zuckerberg, who used the hearing to address the Cambridge Analytica controversy, among other issues.

{mosads}“You’ve done a lot of good,” Kennedy said. “But our promised digital Utopia, we have discovered has mine fields. There are some impurities in the Facebook punch bowl, and they’ve got to be fixed. And I think you can fix them.” 

Facebook has attracted massive attention since it came to light that Cambridge Analytica improperly harvested data on millions of Facebook users that was later used for political targeting. The revelation has raised broader questions about how Facebook handles user data. 

Kennedy predicted Tuesday that the controversy will result in a “whole bunch of bills” being introduced to regulate Facebook, saying that it would largely be up to Zuckerberg whether they pass. 

“You can go back home, spend $10 million on lobbyists and fight us, or you can go back home and help us solve this problem,” Kennedy said.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg defended the company, saying that it already allows users to delete their data and control who it is shared with.