Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 05/06/2019

Facebook’s Troubles

Jack Heath 0:00
From our Auto Fair listener lines for a tech talk update our Tech Talk guy, Craig Peterson on this Monday morning. Good morning Craig.

Craig Peterson 0:06
Hey, good morning Jack. We got more news this week about our friends over at Facebook. And Google is winning the war when it comes to drone deliveries. And our horse came in fourth in the derby. We didn’t win Triple Crown like last year but fourth is bad.

Jack 0:24
Well, no high tech impacts on the derby. That’s good old fashioned horse racing. And we’ll see but what’s going on in terms of I know, there’s been actually quite a bit of news over Facebook in the last week or two.

Craig 0:37
Oh, it’s been absolutely huge. There’s about 4000 pages of documents that have now been looked at by some of the British parliament members who are investigating and Facebook’s data privacy practices. And basically what they’re saying, Oh, this is my word. But a blackout comes to mind when I’m looking at some of these articles that are coming out. Even NBC news, apparently what Mark Zuckerberg was doing is he was using the data on Facebook users in order to strong arm competitors, in order to strong arm people that were not considered friends of Zuckerberg. And more information has come up too about 2012 and 2014. Remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal? Well, it turned out that they had kind of covered up an Obama 2012 Facebook app, that collected information on 190 million people without their knowledge or consent. Somehow that hasn’t made the news. And something that is making the news right now is that Facebook has warned investors to expect the largest ever civil penalty imposed by the FTC, to be imposed on it as much is a $5 billion fine for basically breaking agreement that they get signed with the Department of Justice from what, five, six years ago.

Jack 2:04
Now I you know, maybe Mark Zuckerberg, because of the the the value because of the wealth, maybe he’d be viewed in contribution contribution no matter what plus Facebook, we’ve never really had. I mean, in terms of social media platforms, it really was a game changer, even though there’s other, you know, platforms that are other ways to whether it’s Instagram or other measures or means to communicate, the younger people may not but my point is, it’s hard to tell if Zuckerberg and I don’t mean this in a good or bad way, is a good or bad guy? I mean, you know, the one hand I think he’s put under a lot of scrutiny. there been some things that they’ve supposedly done during the election, private information. You know, he’s put on the suit and gone before Congress and tried to open up and testify but at the end of the day, the jury’s kind of still out on him, isn’t it?

Craig 2:57
Yeah, it is. You remember that movie of course, talking about the twins and Harvard and how he it supposedly stolen the whole idea from Facebook from these guys. I think looking more and more credible that indeed that is what happened. I don’t think Zuckerberg is the kind of guy that you’d want to go into business with or trust frankly, well, Facebook it’s starting to fall down and that’s always happened right? The big guy gets knocked off the perch

Jack 3:25
Yeah, but it depends on a lot of investors and a lot of value there. We’ll see if they can keep up with it and of course the whole thing because it, didn’t it also goes to go back to something was it some the original something new with Exeter and then Harvard you know, basically the yearbook the whole idea if he just put that concept onto the web and let people communicate the way you know you do over your yearbook and past class. 

Craig 3:47
Well yeah, that’s true. But you know, Jack, one interesting point most people don’t know is how did he started? How did you start this little yearbook, this Facebook of rating another CoEd? He stole the photos from the universities’ computer systems. So there’s allegations of a lot of misuse over the years.

Jack 4:06
Isn’t that innovation. No, I’m kidding Craig Peterson. Our Tech Talk guy. Well, you know, while a lot of people will get different news we have tensions mounting in the Middle East.