*By Alisha Haridasani and Jacqueline Corba*
European lawmakers aggressively questioned Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, indicating they may consider further restricting the social media company's unchecked growth and regulating its business practices.
Zuckerberg, meeting publicly with members of the European Parliament in Brussels, again apologized for the company's failure to protect the personal data of millions of Facebook users from a third-party app that shared their information with the British research firm Cambridge Analytica.
"We haven't done enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm," Zuckerberg said Tuesday, echoing the apology he offered Congress in testimony last month in Washington. "That was a mistake."
But European lawmakers were even more confrontational than their American counterparts, piling questions on Zuckerberg over Facebook's failure to combat fake news, thwart foreign interference in democratic elections, and limit the access of private data collected from its users.
"They asked very intelligent questions that were drawn from the hearings in the Senate and the House of Representatives, building on them in very interesting ways," said Adi Robertson, a senior reporter for The Verge.
A German member of the European Parliament asked pointedly about Facebook’s market share, and whether it should be subject to [antitrust regulations](https://www.c-span.org/video/?446000-1/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-testifies-eu-lawmakers), a common theme in Tuesday's questions.
“It is time to discuss breaking Facebook’s monopoly because it’s already too much power in only one hand?” said Manfred Weber, the head of the European Parliament’s majority party, the European People's Party.
Guy Verhofstadt, a Belgium leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, suggested the company should consider splitting up WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger. “Could you or would you cooperate with the European antitrust authorities?” he asked Zuckerberg.
This line of questioning about Facebook's monopoly position was very "aggressive," said Roberson.
After all of the lawmakers asked their questions, Zuckerberg chose a few to answer at the end of the session, and he vowed to respond to the rest with written statements. With so many of their questions unanswered and no time remaining, the meeting bizarrely descended into back-and-forth bickering among lawmakers over the flawed format of the hearing.
"It seems like even people who were there on the floor were sort of baffled by the choice of panel," said Robertson.
Zuckerberg's questioning took place days before Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, goes into effect. The new law, one of the most sweeping privacy protection laws in the world, requires all companies to share how online user data is used and offer users the option to delete their data. Companies that fail to comply can be fined up to 4 percent of their global revenue.
Zuckerberg said Tuesday that Facebook would extend to users elsewhere in the world the same data privacy protections that European citizens will have under the new law.
“At the heart of Europe’s new data protection law, the GDPR, are three important principles: control, transparency, and accountability,” he said. “We’ve always shared these values.”
For the full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/zuckerberg-testifies-to-european-parliament).
We are just one day away from what has been called the most influential tech event in the world. CES 2022 will officially kick off on Wednesday in Las Vegas, but the annual tech summit is being impacted by COVID-19, like so many other recent events. The Consumer Technology Association originally planned for a hybrid event to take place from January 5-8, with some in-person events and some virtual; however, a few big-name companies announced they will not be attending in-person, so the CTA decided to shorten the event by one day, with it now ending on Friday. Consumer electronics senior analyst Will Greenwald joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
Harry Yeh, Managing Director at Quantum Fintech Group, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where he explains why his firm has a target estimate of $400,000 for Bitcoin this year.
California's new composting law will affect what residents do in their kitchens. As of this week, Californians will have to recycle excess food in an effort to reduce emissions caused by food waste. Cities and counties will turn recycled food into compost or use it as a renewable energy source. California's new law is the largest mandatory residential food waste recycling program in the country. Rachel Wagoner, Director of the California Department of Resources, Recycling and Recovery called the law 'the biggest change to trash' since recycling started in the 1980s. She joined Cheddar Climate to discuss.
Like the big changeover to e-commerce for retail, the COVID-19 pandemic has moved car buying trends to the digital showroom. Karl Brauer, an executive analyst at iSeeCars.com, joined Cheddar to talk about the "mindset shift" in consumers and businesses to order-based systems in the United States (something more common in other countries). While more than 60 percent of consumers still prefer to visit dealerships in-person, Brauer noted that consumers are better off ordering a car to spec, which would also help improve supply constraints. "It's really bad right now to be building cars and not really knowing who's going to buy them or when they're going to sell," he said. Manufacturing a car to order would maximize the efficiency of obtaining materials through the supply chain rather than "shotgunning it" at dealerships.
Mark MacDougall, attorney and former prosecutor with the criminal division of the Department of Justice, joined Cheddar to discuss the fraud conviction of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. MacDougall addressed Holmes' stance that what she did was no different than any other Silicon Valley startup's approach to business and how this will shake out for the industry going forward. "I can't imagine it doesn't have some salutary effect on entrepreneurs and people involved in new ventures going forward," he said. Holmes was found guilty on 4 of 11 counts, with each carrying a maximum of 20 years in prison, but MacDougall explained that the lengthy prison sentences were unlikely.
Sports betting is going mainstream in the United States. Dozens of states have legalized it, California is set to do the same this year. Arizona, which legalized sports betting in September, set new national records for gambling in its first months. Daniel Graetzer, CEO of Maximbet, joins Cheddar News to discuss what's next for the booming industry.
A new report from ProPublica and the Washington Post found that Facebook Groups played a major role in the spread of misinformation linked to the January 6 insurrection with more than 650,000 posts claiming that Joe Biden's election victory was illegitimate.
On this episode of Cheddar Reveals, Dr. Anita Gupta, Adjunct assistant professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, shares her forecast for the healthcare industry in 2022; Waseem Asghar, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Computer & Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Florida Atlantic University, breaks down the latest progress, trends, and innovations in wearable health tech; Cheddar gets a look at Curiosity Stream's 'Hacking our Biome.'
Waseem Asghar, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Computer & Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Florida Atlantic University, joins Cheddar Reveals to break down the latest progress, trends, and innovations in wearable health tech.
