Summary of the antitrust hearing

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We return from the August break talking about privacy and mainly of Facebook And Google. We will do a mini-recap of the antitrust hearing that took place on July 29th ¹. In this hearing the CEOs of Facebook, Amazon, Google And Apple. So Mark attended Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai. It was a hearing as part of the antitrust investigation into American Big Tech giants.

Let's take inspiration from an article by Shoshana Wodinsky on Gizmodo to summarize a little what they said. But above all what they said Zuckerberg And Pichai about privacy and what data they use. The questions to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, in fact they mainly concerned accusations about the monopoly ofApp Store and its alleged anti-competitive practices (see also Fortnite vs Apple).

TO Bezos (CEO of Amazon) mainly asked if it is true that it favors the products it sells directly over those of independent sellers. ². By the way: but How much does Jeff Bezos earn?

Antitrust Hearing Summary: Google

TO Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet (so of Google), it got a little worse. During the hearing he is asked a question about GDPR to which he responds by saying: “long been working to comply with GDPR, we're in full compliance, to the extent of my knowledge.”. That is: Google has been working to comply with the GDPR for some time and is now in full compliance, as far as he knows.
Google in fact could be be truly technically compliant with the law. In reality, however, he tries to use some gaps in the legislation to his advantage ³. In addition to having already received a fine of 57 million dollars from France for violating it ⁴ and another of 670.000$ from Belgium ⁵.

Google and the GDPR

This is because even though it most likely is technically okay with the GDPR, it actually hides the various approvals in actual walls of text that no one in their right mind would read (except those from the NYT's The Privacy Project). In short, it is not enough to say: "hey, I wrote it!", it should also be said explicitly and in a few immediate lines. Otherwise nothing changes for the end user.

Finally we talked about data. Pichai claims that: “we don't use data from Gmail for ads […] on the services where we do provide ads, and if users have allowed to ads personalization, yes, we do have data.”. So it says that currently emails are no longer analyzed for advertisements (they once were, and she got caught red-handed) but this does not mean that all our behaviors are not analyzed. What and how much we see, which ads we click, which we ignore and so on. Even if Google does not share the details of our emails and searches with advertisers, it manages to share all our behaviors with them ⁶.

What if you turn off ad personalization instead? Well in this only the ads shown change, this option in fact it doesn't prevent data collection by Google ⁷.

Antitrust Hearing Summary: Facebook

Last chapter: Facebook. Also in this case Zuckerberg responds with arguments technically flawlessHowever, it is a shame that in reality things turn out differently. In fact, he is asked if deities are used Cookies (What are?) to collect private information about people who use its services. His answer is no, they are not used Cookies.

It's a shame, however, that Facebook simply uses another tool, equally (if not more) effective than them Cookies that is called Facebook pixels. The Facebook pixel can in fact keep track of many things. It can know our online shopping cart, what application we use, whether we donate or not and much more ⁸.

Furthermore, Facebook gives companies the opportunity to insert their own Cookies within the Facebook pixel ⁹, in doing so it delegates responsibility to third-party companies and washes its hands of it.

Antitrust Hearing Summary: Conclusions

In short, as you can see, although Big Tech companies continually say in words that they are on our side and many other good things, in reality the facts are very different. It is for this reason that we insist on ours practical examples. The words are important but they leave whatever time they find. With practical examples we can easily see what happens and what could happen with our data and with them our interactions!

If you are interested in recording the entire session (it's 6 hours!) you can see it at this address: https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=T0gJYFX8WVc.

1. How did the hearing of the CEOs of the large platforms in Congress go?[↩]
2. Jeff Bezos rejects accusations Amazon was “bullying” small suppliers[↩]
3. The 2020 Guide to Google Analytics and GDPR Compliance[↩]
4. French data protection watchdog fines Google $57 million under the GDPR[↩]
5. Google fined $670K for violating GDPR's 'right to be forgotten'[↩]
6. The Only Gmail Ads Guide You Need to Promote Your Offers[↩]
7. Check the ads you see[↩]
8. Facebook pixel events[↩]
9. About your settings Cookies for the Facebook pixel[↩]

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