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A top Democratic senator met with Mark Zuckerberg for an hour and came away more pessimistic

Apr 10, 2018, 00:06 IST

Alex Wong/Getty Images

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  • Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with Florida Sen. Bill Nelson on Monday ahead of his hearing on privacy concerns.
  • Nelson left the meeting believing Zuckerberg is sincere in fixing any privacy issues, but pessimistic about progress coming from Congress.

WASHINGTON - Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat, on Monday in advance of his marathon hearing before the Senate's Judiciary and Commerce committees slated for Tuesday afternoon. After the meeting concluded, Nelson suggested the hearing will lack substance and Congress is unlikely to pursue legislation to significantly regulate data collection from tech companies.

Zuckerberg, who is meeting with a handful of lawmakers before his hearings over the next few days, spent more than an hour in a one-on-one, closed-door meeting with Nelson, where they discussed a number of issues.

"My personal opinion of him was that he was forthright and honest to the degree that he could," Nelson told reporters after the meeting concluded. "But I think there are gonna be a lot of challenges for his company in the future."

Nelson said he explained to Zuckerberg that because of scandals like the recent data misuse by Cambridge Analytica, assurances of privacy from these major tech companies alone will not be significant.

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"You can't protect our privacy just on the basis of somebody telling you that they're gonna protect," Nelson said. "So does that mean law? Yes. Does that mean regulation? Yes."

But Nelson stressed that he does not see any new laws or regulations hitting the books in the near future.

"Right now, I think it's gonna be very difficult" to push something through Congress, Nelson said, adding that his confidence that Americans' data will be secure going into the 2018 election cycle is "to be determined."

And the purpose of Nelson's meeting with Zuckerberg is over frustrations that Tuesday's hearing will be conducted too hastily. Zuckerberg's testimony will be in a rare joint hearing, where dozens of senators will have a fixed amount of time to ask the billionaire tech mogul what they want.

"How in the world can you have 44 senators do a hearing that has a lot of substance when each senator has only four minutes?" Nelson grumbled. "I was an objector to being a combined hearing. It ought to have been a Commerce Committee hearing and Judiciary where each committee could operate in its own way."

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"It doesn't seem to me that it's gonna be a format that you're gonna get a lot of substance because the four minutes that run out and you've got to move on," Nelson added.

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