Zuckerberg fronts up
Pressure grows over firm’s use of users’ personal data
Band reaking five days of silence, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg yesterday apologised for a “major breach of trust”, admitted mistakes and outlined steps to protect user data in light of a privacy scandal involving a Trump-connected datamining firm.
“So this was a major breach of trust and I’m really sorry that this happened,” Zuckerberg said of the scandal involving data mining firm Cambridge Analytica in an interview on CNN. “You know, we have a basic responsibility to protect people’s data and if we can’t do that then 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.
Zuckerberg and Facebook’s No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, had been quiet since news broke on Saturday that Cambridge may have used data improperly obtained from roughly 50 million Facebook users to try to sway elections. Cambridge’s clients included United States President Donald Trump’s general-election campaign.
In the CNN interview, 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.
In almost the next breath, however, Zuckerberg steered clear of endorsing a bill that would write such rules into federal law, and instead talked up Facebook’s own voluntary efforts on that front.
Even before the scandal broke, Facebook has already taken the most important steps to prevent a recurrence, Zuckerberg said. For example, in 2014, it reduced access outside apps had to user data.
However, some of the measures didn’t take effect until a year later, allowing Cambridge to access the data in the intervening months.
Zuckerberg acknowledged that there was more to do.
In his Facebook post, Zuckerberg said Facebook would ban developers who don’t agree to an audit. An app’s developer would no longer have access to data from people who haven’t used that app in three months. Data would be generally limited to user names, profile photos and email.
In a separate post, Facebook said it would inform people whose data was misused by apps. Facebook first learned of this breach of privacy more than two years ago, but hadn’t mentioned it publicly until Saturday.
The company said it was “building a way” for people to know if their data was accessed by “This Is Your Digital