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Recode Daily: Mark Zuckerberg cherry-picked the questions he answered for the EU Parliament

Plus, civil rights groups are not happy that Amazon is selling facial-recognition tech to police; Starbucks is way ahead in the mobile-payments race; and what’s inside a food truck?

Facebook co-founder, chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg opens a water bottle as he testifies to the European Parliament next to President of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani in Brussels, Belgium on May 22, 2018.
European Parliament / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images

Facebook CEO Zuckerberg faced a bunch of tough questions about Facebook’s data practices during his hour-long appearance before the European Parliament in Belgium. But he also got to cherry-pick the questions he answered, and issued broad talking points instead of direct answers. European regulators weren’t happy: ”In total, you apologized 15 or 16 times in the last decade,” said Guy Verhofstadt, leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. “Every year you have one or another wrongdoing with your company. ... Are you able to fix it?” You can watch Zuckerberg’s slightly contentious meeting here. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]

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Amazon is selling facial-recognition technology to police, allowing them to analyze “millions of faces in real time.” Sold by the company’s fast-growing Amazon Web Services unit, the facial-recognition technology, called Rekognition, has been used by police in Oregon over the past year and reduced the identification time of reported suspects from two to three days down to minutes. In a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the ACLU and other civil rights organizations called on Amazon to “stop powering a government surveillance infrastructure that poses a grave threat to customers and communities across the country.” [Jason Del Rey / Recode]

Tesla isn’t shipping that “affordable” $35,000 Model 3 electric vehicle — which is a problem if CEO Elon Musk wants the company to appeal to a mass market. Two years ago, Musk unveiled the entry-level Model 3, inspiring hundreds of thousands to deposit $1,000 to get on the waiting list. But over the weekend, he tweeted that Tesla will be shipping a more expensive version of its Model 3 — starting at $78,000 — and that the company would “lose money and die” if it stuck to the originally promised price. [Johana Bhuiyan / Recode]

Starbucks’s mobile payments system has more U.S. users than Apple Pay or Google Pay, its closest competitors. By the end of this year, a quarter of U.S. smartphone users — 55 million people — will make an in-store mobile payment, and nearly 24 million of them will have done so through the Starbucks app, whose popularity could be credited to early adoption, ease of use and a loyal customer base that has been incentivized by a robust rewards program. [Rani Molla / Recode]

Music industry legend Lyor Cohen used to complain about YouTube. Now he wants you to pay $10 a month for it. Cohen, who used to run big record labels, now works for YouTube, which just introduced a new ad-free subscription service in the hope of mollifying the labels. Cohen agreed to talk about YouTube Music — and Childish Gambino, and that famous/infamous Kanye West photo — on an episode of the Recode Media podcast. [Peter Kafka / Recode]

Does Trump write his own tweets? Sometimes. And when he doesn’t, his ghostwriter aides make sure the president’s anything-but-random communications are as peppered with misspellings and grammatical glitches as the real-ish thing (!). Trump has also gone rogue on phone security: He uses at least two iPhones — one for making calls and the other equipped only with the Twitter app and preloaded with a handful of news sites. But the phones aren’t equipped with sophisticated security features designed to shield his communications. [Annie Linskey / The Boston Globe]

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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