ZUCKERBERG SAYS SORRY ON ‘BREACH OF TRUST’
BREAKING five days of silence, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologised for a “major breach of trust”, admitted mistakes and outlined steps to protect user data in light of a privacy scandal involving a Trumpconnected data-mining firm.
“I am really sorry that happened,” Mr Zuckerberg said of the scandal involving data mining firm Cambridge Analytica. Facebook has a “responsibility” to protect its users’ data, he said in a Wednesday interview on CNN. If it fails, he said, “we don’t deserve to have the opportunity to serve people”.
His mea culpa on cable television came a few hours after he acknowledged his company’s mistakes in a Facebook post, but without saying he was sorry.
Mr Zuckerberg and Facebook’s No.2 Sheryl Sandberg had been quiet since news broke on Friday that Cambridge may have used data improperly obtained from 50 million Facebook users to try to sway elections. Cambridge’s clients included Donald Trump’s election campaign.
Facebook shares have dropped some 8 per cent, lopping about $46 billion off the company’s market value, since the revelations.
In the CNN interview, Mr Zuckerberg offered equivocal and carefully hedged answers to two other questions. He said, for instance, that he would be “happy” to testify before Congress, but only if it was “the right thing to do”. He went on to note that many other Facebook officials might be more appropriate witnesses depending on what Congress wanted to know.
Similarly, the Facebook chief seemed at one point to favour regulation for Facebook and other internet giants – at least the “right” kind of rules, he said, such as ones that require online political ads to disclose who paid for them. But he steered clear of endorsing a bill that would write such rules into federal law.