Zuckerberg is ‘passively living in a bubble’: Super{set} Founder

Yahoo Finance’s Julie Hyman, Brian Cheung, and Brian Sozzi break down the future of Facebook and big tech with Tom Chavez Super{set} Co-Founder.

Video transcript

- We were just talking through the financials for Facebook with Mark Mahaney. Now, I want to get into the more existential questions that this report and all of the reporting around Facebook have been bringing up. To talk about that, we're joined by Tom Chavez he is superset co-founder. He does venture capital in a number of different ventures in what he calls ethical technology.

Thank you so much for being here, Tom. Really appreciate it. I do want to dig into what ethical tech means in a moment, but first, I do want to ask you to react to what we heard from Facebook and specifically that pushback on the part of Mark Zuckerberg against critics who are saying that the company is not taking enough care when it comes to many different issues, including a treatment of body image in teens and also political issues around the globe.

TOM CHAVEZ: Well, thanks for having me, Julie. Look, it is interesting, let's note, that Mark is blaming it on polarization. There's some irony in this in that maybe he's not recognizing or fully understanding some of the heavy things that are going on not just in the market but in his employee base. So as the prior guest noted, he is speaking to his employees at the beginning of the call yesterday.

Look, these are sporty times for Facebook, and it's an intense moment for Zuckerberg. As some of the reporting has been indicating, he is possibly living in a bubble himself, where many of the people around him would like to punch through that bubble and share a more plainspoken perspective as to what's going on. The jury's out and, and this will be a really tectonic moment for Facebook years from now when people look back at it to see if and how the company rises up and what kind of leadership from the top Zuckerberg, and Sandberg, and others can exert.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Tom, it's Brian Cheung here. And it does seem like there is that responsibility because they are the giant in the social media space, but what's interesting is that his commentary did acknowledge that there appears to be these types of problems, not just at Facebook. He was trying to spread the blame by saying, look all these other social media companies are just as guilty of the same thing. What is Facebook's responsibility in this dialogue?

TOM CHAVEZ: Look, what Facebook has is this enormous responsibility of being so close to billions of people across the planet. Google operates a broad swath of utilities that we all depend on now increasingly to lead our digital lives, but Facebook is up close and personal in a way that almost no other company is.

The level of data collection, the breadth and depth of the data that Facebook has regarding who we are, what we like, where we go, what we don't like, we've never seen anything like this truly in the course of human history. So the responsibility Facebook bears is extreme. And I think there can be no question that Facebook has trampled on our privacy, and this is one of the things that's motivational for many of us in my team and others here who are saying, look, privacy is an essential human right.

And people don't recall this, but once upon a time, Facebook had a privacy policy. That got airbrushed into a data usage policy. At the very beginning, when Facebook was competing against Myspace, its value proposition to consumers was that we're Facebook. We take privacy seriously. So all of that is sadly a thing of the past, and I think the opportunity over here now is to take very seriously the rights of citizens and consumers across the planet because that's how broad Facebook is to respect their privacy and to be good stewards of our personal data.

- To the point of Mark Mahaney, who we're speaking with a few moments ago, Facebook has not lost users. It hasn't lost advertisers seemingly, at least not for these reasons. It hasn't lost too many investors. So how do you present a market alternative, a market-based alternative for something like Facebook when there doesn't seem to be a lot of demand for it? Or is it a situation where you build it, and they will come?

TOM CHAVEZ: Julie, what you're pointing to is the way in which I think all of us are complicit in what's unfolded over here. Consumers consistently across time now have favored convenience over security. They've tilted towards cool stuff over privacy.

So we're all responsible to some degree, and I think that's one of the reasons why the drums are beating now among regulators and legislators to address the problem. I'm not going to comment on exactly how this settles because nobody really knows. It's suspenseful and I think a lot of us are interested to see how it goes, but we do have a good pattern in competitive markets, wherein regulators do come in and protect the dignity and interests of consumers in ways like this.

I like to point out, I depend implicitly on the FDA to make sure there's no salmonella in my chicken. I don't think about that every single day but it happens, and it's one of the many services that the FDA provides for citizens, again, without many of us even being aware of it. I think we could be at a similar moment now when it-- as regards social media, Facebook, and personal data.