Zuckerberg claimed governments' use of technology companies, such as Facebook, to spy on citizens will lead to a loss of trust with customers that will ultimately damage their ability to operate at an international level, during a speech at an event hosted by The Atlantic magazine in Washington, Reuters reported.
During the event Zuckerberg mirrored widespread calls within the security community for governments to be open about what data their spying campaigns are gathering from companies.
"What I can tell from the data that I see at Facebook is that I think the more transparency and communication [from] the government about how they're requesting the data from us, the better everyone would feel about it," he said.
"From reading in the media, you couldn't get a sense whether the number of requests that the government makes is closer to 1,000 or closer to 100 million. I think the more transparency the government has, the better folks would feel."
Ex-Navy Seal and Silent Circle chief executive officer Mike Janke made a similar claim during an interview with V3 last month, arguing that businesses, consumers and governments need to have an open conversation about what data government agencies, such as the NSA and GCHQ can collect.
Zuckerberg's comments are the latest step in Facebook's ongoing battle to publicly disclose what data requests it received from the NSA. Facebook is currently petitioning the US government to let it release information showing what data was taken from its servers.
The Facebook chief is one of many business leaders and politicians to point out the potential damage spying campaigns such as PRISM can have on countries' economies. Vice president of the European Commission and EU commissioner for justice Viviane Reding claimed that Europe's economy will suffer unless new uniform, cross-national data protection laws are created to prevent programmes such as PRISM re-occurring.
No comments:
Post a Comment