5 Questions that stumped Zuckerberg

Image: Aaron P. Bernstein / Reuters


Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg was summoned to Capitol Hill in April, where he was grilled by US lawmakers over a data breach that affected 87 million users of the social networking site, mostly Americans. Here are five things to which Zuckerberg didn’t have an immediate answer. His team would get back on these, he said:

1. How long does Facebook store data after a user deletes his/her profile?

2. A senator raised the question of specific, unverified Facebook pages and asked if they were Russian-created groups, saying they were a lot like the anonymous groups Russian agents used to spread propaganda during the 2016 US presidential elections.

3. Who is your [Facebook’s] biggest competitor?

4. Where are the 87 million affected users geographically located? Could they have been potentially influenced in the 2016 US presidential elections?

5. Does Facebook track users across devices? Does it track a person on a device not directly connected to Facebook, if the user is using Facebook on another device?