If Senators Don ’ t Understand Facebook, How Will They Make Sense of Digital Health?

Mark Zuckerberg’s testimonial in front of US lawmakers not only marks the significance of the data privacy scandal around Cambridge Analytica and Facebook but also shows how partially policy-makers understand the operation of that social media platform. If their notion about such a massive part of the technology world is so incomplete, what can we expect when artificial intelligence, bioterrorism, robotic arms, exoskeletons or other elements of digital health will be put on the table? The importance of being the regulator the tech world needs Mark Zuckerberg faced a two-day congressional hearing – one before the Senate and another before the House of Representatives – in mid-April in response to the revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British data-mining firm affiliated with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, harvested personal information from more than 87 million Facebook users – among them Mark Zuckerberg’s – in an attempt to influence the results of the US presidential elections. The issues at hand are of paramount importance. Users, regulators, and policymakers should know what Facebook knows about them, whether there is any discrepancy between what Facebook says it knows and the actual amount of data it gathers; and what Facebook lets advertisers do with the harvested information. Zuckerberg appeared before the deputies for the first time, which also signifies the gravity of the events. And not just the fact that regulators show their interest i...
Source: The Medical Futurist - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Healthcare Policy bioterrorism Cambridge Analytica data data analytics data breach data privacy digital health ethics facebook future health policy law nanotechnology policy-making regulation sci-fi science fiction Source Type: blogs