I helped plan the Zuckerberg hearing. We panicked over likes — now we give AI our passwords

By Ryan Dattilo

Published October 7, 2026 8:00am ET

In April 2018, I was counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee and helped plan the hearing where Mark Zuckerberg testified before nearly half the Senate.

The immediate issue was Cambridge Analytica. About 300,000 people had used a personality quiz that ultimately gave the developer access to information on as many as 87 million Facebook users, most of whom had never taken the quiz themselves.