Facebook’s PR crisis self-inflicted

problem go away.

By contrast, Facebook waited three years to disclose this incident. That’s what has led to so much outrage and so many investigations. If the company had immediately announced the breach, lawmakers and the public would still have had a lot of questions about how it protects user data. However, Facebook would have avoided the charges of secrecy that have now led so many people (including me) to question its underlying values.

One reason Facebook may have decided to withhold the information for so long is that it was trying to figure out how to prevent such episodes from happening again. However, companies don’t need to resolve a problem fully before they disclose it. Helio Fred Garcia, president of the Logos Consulting Group and author of The Agony of Decision: Mental Readiness and Leadership in a Crisis, says that a company determining how to address a crisis should ask itself this question: “What would reasonable people appropriately expect a responsible organization or leader to do when facing this kind of situation?”

Reasonable people wouldn’t expect a company that just learned that its data has been improperly shared to have developed a full plan within minutes to prevent such a situation from recurring. They would, however, expect the company to be transparent, express remorse, pledge to take action to prevent the problem from happening again, and follow