The chairmen of the House Bipartisan Privacy Caucus sent that nice young man from Facebook a letter about Facebook's problems with user information getting leaked out to advertisers through third-party apps. Good for them! I hope it was strongly worded.
So, we have a House Bipartisan Privacy Caucus. Did you know? It's kind of nice, actually, that there are some people in the government who are at least nominally thinking about how fucked we are, with this whole "privacy" thing. But, you know, it's the internet, which is an unstoppable juggernaut of a mutant strain of techo-capitalism, intent on selling everything, to itself, like a bizarre free-market version of the ouroboros, so the thing might as well be called the House Bipartisan Chivalry Caucus or the House Bipartisan Mercantilism Caucus, for all it will make sense in a hundred years, when we sign in to vote for president using Facebook Connect. (Joking! A hundred years, no one will "vote," they will just "like" candidates.)
Either way, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has till October 27 to answer the questions from Representatives Edward Markey (D - Mass.) and Joe Barton (R - Texas), or he will be in a lot of trouble. Probably, Facebook will wave its hand and tweak its privacy settings a little bit and the government will go back to avoiding responsibility and everyone who isn't you will keep getting richer by selling to other people the number of minutes you spent on YouPorn every day.
But wouldn't it be great if they hauled him in for hearings? They could ask questions like: "Why did you let my mom have a Facebook account?" and "Remember when Facebook didn't even have photos?"
[WSJ]