Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will never appear to be the same after Congress cross examines him on his social network's privacy issues, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, R-Ark., said Thursday.
"How did they make the money?" Huckabee commented during Fox News' "Outnumbered," after panelists discussed how the company has grown over the past years to be valued at billions of dollars. "They made the money by scraping data off they sold to people. Mark Zuckerberg needs to take a picture of himself before he walks in that hearing. He is never going to look the same. They are going to strip the skin off of him, Democrats and Republicans."
Show host Harris Faulkner noted it seems everyone wants some of Zuckerberg because of the company's business model.
"I mean, they can sugarcoat this any kind of way they want to sugarcoat it, but who really thought they had a lot of privacy online to begin with," she said. "When you look at some of his old text messages, he knew what he was scooping up and giving away. There was a price on it. It was a business model."
Facebook is scared of Zuckerberg's congressional hearing, set for next week, for two reasons, Huckabee said.
"If he gets excoriated, like I expect that he will be, at lot of people are going to unfriend him in a very big way, and a lot of other companies are going to start saying what do we have to do to keep from having to be trotted [out]," Huckabee said. "The other big fear is that the government will decide they will regulate and that they should regulate and that, I believe, will be as big, if not bigger of a disaster than the wild, wild West."
And Zuckerberg will fight that, the former governor said.
"What else is he going to say?" he said. "Deep down, do you think he wants to say 'regulate me?' Come on. That's like saying to a surgeon 'cut me open, but don't use any anesthesia. Just let it rip.'"