Jack Ma urges Facebook to fix privacy issue

BOAO (China): Jack Ma, founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, yesterday urged Facebook Inc to resolve its data privacy problems, a day before the social media giant’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was due to appear at United States. congressional hearings.

Ma, speaking at the Boao Forum for Asia in China’s southern Hainan province, was asked about privacy issues that had dogged Facebook in recent weeks after it said the personal information of up to 87 million users might have been improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

“The senior management should take responsibility, say ‘hey, from now we start to work on it’,” said Ma after initially refraining from weighing in on the issue.

“I will not make a comment about Facebook, but I will say, Facebook, 15 years ago, they never expected this thing to grow like that,” he said.

“Right, it’s like a social network, it’s got two billion people using it! So all of the problems they did not realise came up! It is the time we fix it.

“But I think the problem would be solved, we should not kill the company because of these problems,” said Ma.

Zuckerberg will appear before the US Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees today to address questions about how his company handles its users’ data.