FACEBOOK CHIEF ADMITS ‘MISTAKES’ WERE MADE IN SOCIAL MEDIA SCANDAL

▶ As storm of legislation threatens, Mark Zuckerberg says ‘full audit’ of apps with access to significant amounts of personal data will be carried out

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the social media company will conduct “full audits” of all apps that have access to large amounts of data. The company made mistakes and needed to fix the problem, he said.

“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” Mr Zuckerberg said on his Facebook page on Wednesday, his first public comments since the scandal broke last weekend.

He said: “I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

“The most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago.

“But we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.”

The scandal first erupted when a whistleblower from British data firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) said it was able to create psychological profiles on 50 million Facebook users through a personality prediction app downloaded by 270,000 people that also scooped up their friends’ data.

CA is alleged to have used the information for Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential election campaign.

Mr Zuckerberg’s admission followed another day of accusations against the world’s biggest social network.

A former Facebook employee told British politicians the company had a “Wild West” approach to personal data protection, while a privacy campaigner said he had warned in 2011 of the loopholes that led to the crisis.

Sandy Parakilas, who worked in policy compliance and data protection for Facebook between 2011 and 2012, said the platform’s data policies “had very few ways of discovering abuse or enforcing on abuse when it was discovered”.

“Facebook was allowing developers to access the data of people who hadn’t explicitly authorised that,” he told a parliamentary committee.

Facebook, Mr Parakilas said, was “aware that this had happened and didn’t notify anyone, and then should have been aware that it was continuing to happen and then didn’t notify anyone.”

Meanwhile, Max Schrems, a Vienna-based activist who has brought online data protection cases before European courts, told AFP he had complained to the Irish Data Protection Authority in 2011 about the data harvesting methods.

Mr Schrems said that he had a seven-hour meeting with Facebook representatives the following year to discuss concerns about apps operating in this fashion, but that they said they saw no problems with their policies.

Legislators on both sides of the Atlantic have demanded answers, which has ratcheted up the pressure on Facebook – already under fire for allowing fake news to proliferate on its platform during the US presidential election.

A movement to quit the social network gathered momentum on Wednesday, while a handful of lawsuits emerged that could turn into class actions that may prove costly for the company.

The scandal, which led to the suspension of CA’s chief executive, had wiped US$60 billion (Dh220.35bn) off Facebook’s market value since the start of the week, Bloomberg news reported on Wednesday.

Both Facebook and CA have denied wrongdoing and instead blamed the inventor of the app that harvested the data, academic Aleksandr Kogan, for misusing it.

But earlier Mr Kogan claimed CA had assured him his activities were above board.

“I’m being basically used as a scapegoat by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,” he said. “We thought we were acting perfectly appropriately.

“We were assured by Cambridge Analytica that everything was perfectly legal and within the terms of service of Facebook.”

The University of Cambridge psychologist behind the personality survey This Is Your Digital Life told the BBC that about 200,000 people used his app and about 30 million American Facebook users’ details were acquired.

The app’s vast reach beyond its users allowed it to harvest data from their friends on Facebook, which says the details were taken without its knowledge.

US and EU legislators have asked Mr Zuckerberg to give evidence.

The EU on Wednesday unveiled proposals for a digital tax that targets US tech giants.

The plans are aimed at recovering billions of euros from mainly US multinationals that shift earnings around Europe to pay lower tax rates.

US media reported on Tuesday that the Federal Trade Commission was investigating Facebook over the data scandal.

British Prime Minister Theresa May urged Facebook and CA to co-operate with the national information commissioner’s investigation.

“People need to have confidence in how their personal data is being used,” she said.

“I would expect Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and all organisations involved to comply fully with the investigation that is taking place.”

I’m being basically used as a scapegoat by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. We thought we were acting appropriately ALEKSANDR KOGAN App designer