Facebook CEO, amid crisis, vows to bolster user privacy
Cambridge Analytica news prompted move
SAN FRANCISCO — After several days of silence, amid a growing chorus of criticism, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg publicly addressed the misuse of data belonging to 50 million users of the social network.
“We have a responsibility to protect your data,” Zuckerberg said Wednesday in a Facebook post, his preferred means of communication, “and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you.”
Zuckerberg, 33, was trying to quell a ballooning crisis over reports last weekend that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, had used data that had been improperly obtained from Facebook to target voters for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The statement fell short of a full-throated apology, but in his post, Zuckerberg said that Facebook would contact users whose data had been harvested through a personality quiz app and passed along to Cambridge Analytica.
In his statement, Zuckerberg laid out a timeline of Facebook’s dealings with Cambridge Analytica and described the steps the company would take to safeguard the information of its more than 2 billion monthly users.
Zuckerberg said Facebook would investigate apps, like the third-party quiz app, that had access to “large amounts of information” from the social network from before it had made changes to its policies. He also said the company would restrict third-party developers’ access to data on the social network.
“We also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it,” he wrote.
Independent researchers who have used data from Facebook said that Zuckerberg’s statement did not acknowledge how the very gathering of user data is fundamental to the company’s operations.
“He avoided the big issue, which is that for many years, Facebook was basically giving away user data like it was handing out candy,” said Jonathan Albright, research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. “There is no question that handing out that data made Facebook the success it is as a company. This has to be recognized as part of their business model and not just a one-off problem.”