Can Congress Rein In Big Tech?

Washington has been happy to let high-tech companies police themselves—until now

- Katy Steinmetz

ABOUT TWO HOURS INTO A SENATE HEARING ON April 10, Mark Zuckerberg was asked if he would like to take a break. He was in the midst of a rare spectacle: two powerful committees, with a total of 44 Senators, were holding a joint hearing to grill a single CEO. So when Zuckerberg responded by saying he wasn’t tired yet, the packed room broke into laughter. The levity didn’t last long. “What happened here was, in effect, willful blindness,” said Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, the next at bat, as he pressed the 33-year-old Facebook founder on exactly how a political marketing firm called Cambridge Analytica ended up with data from some 87 million users’ profiles without their consent. “It was heedless,” he went on, “and reckless.”

In Silicon Valley, heedlessness and recklessness have traditionally been seen as virtues—Facebook’s early internal rallying cry was “move fast and break things”—and necessary precursors for innovation. But a long-simmering reality check is coming to a head across the high-tech industry. While privacy concerns and even large-scale data breaches are nothing new, experts say the fracas at Facebook has brought the dilemma of increasingly powerful technology into better focus. “Being these networked citizens of the world, it’s kind of a struggle, at times, to say why we care about privacy,” says Urs Gasser, executive director at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. “But in this case, there is this element that the data about us is suddenly used to manipulate us in our decisionmaking and somehow mess with our democracy.”