The former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen, is on a European tour these days to denounce before the institutions of the EU countries the dangers posed by large technology platforms, as well as the need for regulation that defends consumers against their abuse. After appearing in recent days in London, Lisbon, Berlin and Brussels, he will do so in Paris before the end of the week.
“Facebook is a threat to democracy”, He said yesterday before the members of the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection of the European Parliament in the Belgian capital. This commission is working on the development of the proposal for the Digital Services Act (DSA) presented by the European Commission at the end of 2020, so it wanted to have the opinions of Mark Zuckerberg’s former employee.
“I am very concerned about metaverso”Said Haugen about the company’s commitment to a virtual universe in which users will interact through 3D avatars using virtual reality devices. He also criticized that the company can dedicate 10,000 engineers to the development of this platform and not to security. “It is a bad idea to fill our homes and offices with the sensors of a company that does not respect our privacy. (…) Users have to expose a lot and Facebook has shown that it lies every time it suits it”He added.
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As reported by the European Parliament Haugen explained that “Facebook is much less transparent than other platforms”And that it could do much more to make algorithms, and therefore the content that reaches users, much more secure. In this sense, she was skeptical of the content moderation carried out by artificial intelligence systems: “AI is not smart. It is like putting a million primary school students to solve a problem. He cannot understand things in depth ”.
Haugen also stressed the importance of ensuring that companies like Facebook publicly disclose data and how they collect it to enable people to make transparent decisions and ban “dark patterns” online. “The individuals of these companies, and not the committees, should be personally responsible for the decisions they make.”, He explained to the parliamentarians who wanted to know his opinion about many aspects that the DSA deals with and the operation of Facebook.
The Digital Services Law, which should see the light of day in 2022, it will regulate aspects such as the transparency of the algorithms with which large technology companies work or the personalization of advertising, in addition to forcing the platforms to undergo independent audits. The regulation, for Haugen, has the opportunity to become a “world standard” and inspire other countries to “seek new rules that safeguard our democracies” or “we will lose this unique opportunity in a generation to align the future of technology and democracy”.
Haugen has recently risen to fame as the “deep throat” that has leaked abundant documentation on Facebook’s practices to the Wall Street Journal and that has put Meta before its biggest reputational crisis in 17 years of existence. The series of reports “The Facebook Files” denounces how The company is aware of the damage that its platforms inflict on different layers of society and how it prioritizes the economic benefit over the well-being of the users.
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