The key takeaways from Zuckerberg’s press tour

Amid mounting pressure from customers and regulators, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg broke his public silence Wednesday about the widening Cambridge Analytica scandal. He began with a prepared statement posted on his Facebook page followed by interviews with CNN, Recode, Wired and the New York Times – conversations that offered deeper insight into his perspective on what might amount to the company’s biggest crisis.

Zuckerberg blames Facebook’s naivety.

Facebook’s rise from a service that judged whether Harvard students were hot or not to the world’s largest social network was, by any means, meteoric. In the interviews, Zuckerberg makes the case that in his company’s early days, he never could have anticipated the problems Facebook now faces.

“If you had asked me, when I got started with Facebook, if one of the central things I’d need to work on now is preventing governments from interfering in each other’s elections, there’s no way I thought that’s what I’d be doing, if we talked in 2004 in my dorm room,” he told the Times.

He told Recode’s Kara Swisher that he erred in judgment in his early position on data portability – essentially the movement of data between Facebook and other services.

“You know, frankly, I just got that wrong,” he told Recode. “I was maybe too idealistic on the side of data portability, that it would create more good experiences. And it created some, but I think what the clear feedback was from our community, was that people value privacy a lot more. And they would rather have their data locked down and be sure that nothing bad will ever happen to it, then be able to easily take it and have social experiences in other places. So, over time, we have been just kind of narrowing it down.”

He told the New York Times that Facebook will be investigating “thousands” of apps and that the company would reach out to those developers in the “near term.”

“It isn’t perfect. But I do think that this is going to be a major deterrent going backwards,” he told Recode. “I think it will clean up a lot of data, and going forward, the more important thing is just preventing this from happening in the first place and that’s going to be solved by restricting the amount of data that developers can have access to.”