The fallout from the National Security Agency surveillance scandal hasn’t just hurt trust between American tech companies and foreign governments — it’s also damaged the relationship between American tech companies and their own customers. Per Reuters, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said this week that revelations about the NSA’s vast data collection practices have made users less likely to trust Facebook and said that the government’s handling of the scandal has been woefully inept.
“Response to the NSA issues that have blown up are a big deal for the Internet as a global platform,” Zuckerberg said. “And some of the government statements I think have been profoundly unhelpful… ‘Oh, we only spy on non-Americans.’ Gee thanks… we’re trying to provide an international service, not get crushed in those places either.”
Much like Google and Microsoft, Zuckerberg wants the government to let his company be more transparent about what information it provides to the government and about how many requests it receives to cough up information on its users each year.
“From reading in the media, you couldn’t get a sense whether the number of requests that the government makes is closer to a thousand or closer to a 100 million,” he said. “I think the more transparency the government has, the better folks would feel.”
