The hearing was called to address concerns about the app's data collection practices. The CEO arrived prepared. He had talking points, a patient demeanor, and a legal team that had clearly spent considerable time coaching him on how to answer direct questions with answers that technically contained words but communicated nothing.
Outside the hearing room, the app was doing what it always does: collecting data. Specifically, according to a researcher who published findings that morning, it was pulling device metadata, cross-app behavior signals, and rough location data from users who had the app installed in the background. Some of those users were journalists covering the hearing. Two, reportedly, were staffers for senators on the committee.
The Eleven Times
"Takes privacy seriously" — said eleven times, which works out to roughly once every 22 minutes. Never once was it followed by a specific, falsifiable claim about what "seriously" means in practice. It existed purely as a verbal talisman, a phrase designed to be repeated until it sounds like a policy.
"Senator, we take the privacy of our users extremely seriously, and we have robust systems in place to ensure—" [The senator's follow-up question interrupted here, mercifully.]
The CEO did not explain why the app needs to know which other apps are installed on your phone. He was not asked this question directly, which is its own kind of story about how these hearings go.
The stock was up 2.3% by market close. Privacy, apparently, is priced in.