Chief’s data harvested
Zuckerberg says users in control
FACEBOOK chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has revealed in a second day of sparring with US politicians over privacy concerns he was among the 87 million users whose data was improperly shared.
The admission that even the tech-savvy Facebook founder was unable to protect his data underscored the problem Facebook has in persuading sceptical politicians that users can easily safeguard their own information.
“Every time that someone chooses to share something on Facebook . . . there is a control,” Mr Zuckerberg said.
“Right there. Not buried in the settings somewhere but right there.”
Yet, when asked if his data had been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, he said: “Yes.” He gave no further details.
The 33-year-old internet magnate faced questions and concerns from members of the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, who asked what Facebook was doing to give users more flexibility to opt in to sharing their personal data with the company or third parties.
“How can consumers have control over their data when Facebook does not have control over the data,” Congressman Frank Pallone, of New Jersey, asked at the start of the hearing.
Mr Zuckerberg repeatedly defended the company’s privacy practices, saying users had control over their data and decided what to share.
The Facebook boss said he was not familiar with so-called “shadow profiles”, which media reports have described as collections of data about users that they have no knowledge of or control over.
He also said Facebook did not collect information from users’ verbal conversations through mobile devices’ microphones.
However, in a series of questions on how people could remove data from Facebook, Mr Zuckerberg said Facebook did “collect data on people who are not signed up for Facebook for security purposes”.
He had no response when asked how a person who was not a Facebook member could remove information without first signing up for the service.
“It is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation,” he said.
Mr Zuckerberg was on Capitol Hill for the second time in two days to answer questions about data privacy.
It comes in the wake of revelations last month that millions of users’ personal information was wrongly harvested from the website by Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that has counted US President Donald Trump’s election campaign among its clients.
The latest estimate of affected users is up to 87 million.
The data was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica by an academic who gathered data on users and their friends through a questionnaire app on Facebook.
Facebook has since shut off the ability of apps to gather such data, but Mr Zuckerberg said it would take “many months” to complete an audit of other apps to determine if they also improperly used data.