Exec vows audit of apps in wake of Facebook data ‘breach of trust’

Breaking five days of silence, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday that the tech giant will audit thousands of apps in response to the “breach of trust” created by Cambridge Analytica, after the political marketing firm was accused last week of using data improperly obtained from roughly 50 million Facebook users to try to sway elections.

In a post on his personal Facebook page, Zuckerberg said the company would investigate thousands of apps that used large amounts of data at the time. He said Facebook will give users new tools for how their data are being used and shared, and would further restrict developers’ access to data to prevent abuse.

“I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I’m responsible for what happens on our platform,” he said. “While this specific issue involving Cambridge Analytica should no longer happen with new apps today, that doesn’t change what happened in the past. We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward.”

Specifically, he said, the company would restrict the data that third-party developers can access to a name, profile photo, and email address and will require developers to sign a contract before being allowed to ask Facebook users for rights to their posts. The company will post a new feature on the top of every Facebook user’s news feed

with a list of the apps they have used and an easy way to revoke the app’s access, he said.

Until now, Facebook’s top executives have been mum on Cambridge Analytica. Zuckerberg’s last Facebook post was from early March, where his sister photographed him baking cookies at home for the Jewish holiday, Purim. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, posted Saturday from her child’s school debate.

Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica on Friday for having obtained data on as many as 50 million users in an unauthorized way. Earlier this week, Facebook said it would audit the firm to determine if it had deleted the data.

But the silence only seemed to draw more attention to Facebook’s woes — especially after neither Zuckerberg nor Sandberg appeared Tuesday at a company townhall-style meeting.

Facebook shares have dropped about 8 percent, lopping about $46 billion off the company’s market value, since the revelations were first published.

News organizations published articles asking when company executives would speak. A #DeleteFacebook campaign gained momentum after Brian Acton, who made millions after Facebook purchased his app WhatsApp in 2014, said he was deleting the social network.

After the Tuesday meeting, employees posted on social media about how demoralized they felt. In an app for anonymously discussing the workplace, Blind, which requires a corporate email address to join, a Facebook employee posted, “Is this how the downfall of Myspace happened?” Another wrote, “I just keep thinking about my stock going to zero with all of this.” Others asked for advice about whether they should

sell their stock and said they would advise recruits against joining the company.

Behind the scenes, Facebook was in damage-control mode. Lobbyists made the rounds on Capitol Hill. Communications executives sent statements to journalists saying workers and executives, including Zuckerberg, were “outraged” about being deceived — though little was said about Facebook’s own responsibilities except to defend the legality of their actions.

Facebook said in a news release Wednesday that it will inform people whose data were misused by apps.

The company said it was “building a way” for people to know if their data were accessed by “This Is Your Digital Life,” the psychological-profiling quiz app that researcher Aleksandr Kogan created and paid about 270,000 people to take part in.

Cambridge Analytica later

obtained information from the app for about 50 million Facebook users, as the app also vacuumed up data on people’s friends — including those who never downloaded the app or gave explicit consent.

Chris Wylie, a Cambridge co-founder who left in 2014, has said one of the firm’s goals was to influence people’s perceptions by injecting content, some misleading or false, all around them. It’s not clear whether Facebook would be able to tell users whether they had seen such content.

Cambridge has shifted the blame to Kogan, which the firm described as a contractor. Kogan described himself as a scapegoat.