Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much, Mr. Sherman, for being here today.
As the largest social media site in the world, certainly Facebook's willingness to come here today and take part in our study is something that's commendable and certainly of interest to all of us who use Facebook.
I'd like to start by commenting on your statement of rights and responsibilities and your data user policy. My comment is that Facebook, as I say, deserves some recognition here, because these two documents are actually written in plain language and they don't read like most of the terms of use documents do. We've had an opportunity to go through a lot of different types of businesses to see what they have there for the customer to look at, so I think that's significant. If people haven't taken the time to read through them, I think they should, and they shouldn't be intimidated and expect some legal document that's going to be confusing to them. That's certainly not what they are.
I do have a specific question about the data use agreement. Under the section “Other information we receive about you”, it says that Facebook collects data about the activities of you as a user “whenever you interact with Facebook, such as when you look at another person's timeline, send or receive a message, search for a friend or a Page, click on, view or otherwise interact with things”, and so on.
My question is what does Facebook use the data for? Is it stored indefinitely? For example, a user's list of all the names that they've ever searched for on Facebook, or all of the pages they've viewed: what is this used for, and is it stored indefinitely?
There’s another point I want to ask about. So often when they look at this people have the idea that what they are using is free. I mean, you don't have the value of the company that you have where everything is free; I'm just wondering if you can give us a little bit of a concept of what your business model is as well so that people can put the two thoughts together.