It doesn't matter what congress feigns understanding of, or whatever failure to comprehend they masquerade in front of the cameras.

Facebook is there to listen in on your private conversations, read your mail, build up evidence for who you talk to and associate with. To seem benign and trustworthy while all this takes place is part of the game.

There's this idea to scapegoat the mea culpa off onto faceless shadowy firms, but none of what happened would have ever been possible, if facebook hadn't conspired to log and sell the information it knew to be useful and powerful to begin with.

To invert the blame onto Cambridge Analytica is a mistake, when Facebook's data collection platform was designed to do everything it was used for from the start.

Anything some political consultancy may have done, Facebook was and is doing times a thousand, back then, yesterday, today and tomorrow. And the more time that goes by the worse it gets.

To me it sounded like Cambridge Analytica approached an app developer who sold them the data.

The article isn't mainly about the subject in the title, it's more of a general review of the hearing. However, regarding the question in the title: It is hard to understand anything if you don't try. The article mentions that people were asked before information were shared, but somehow did not understand the implications about that, or did not even read the approval before giving it. So my answer would be: Their hope is great great if they care and carefully go trough their privacy settings and read approval messages before giving. Lousy if they don't care and don't read anything on their screen.

So maybe the solution isn't trying to bring in Zuckerberg into congress and everybody's home to have an introductory course in Facebook privacy settings. Maybe it's about teaching each other about how internet works and making people more aware of how what they share could be used - which might make some users actually care about understanding?

Many members of Congress owe their jobs to the deliberate cultivation of obfuscation, while running for office and in the development of laws, so I'm not sure if their ire at Z comes from genuine concern for their constituents or if they are just protecting their turf.

Congress does not need to "understand" Facebook for them to pass a privacy law.

Congress doesn't need to understand anything in order to pass a law concerning it.

> Congress doesn't need to understand anything in order to pass a law concerning it.

They have made that abundantly clear.