The Facebook CEO has acknowledged the unfolding scandal that revealed data on 50 million Americans had been harvested, pledging to investigate and audit apps
Facebook is changing the way its shares data with third-party applications, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in his first public statement since the Observer reported Saturday that the personal data of about 50 million Americans had been harvested and improperly shared with a political consultancy.
Zuckerberg broke his five-day silence on the scandal that has enveloped his company this week in a Facebook post acknowledging that the policies that allowed the misuse of data were “a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it”.
“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” Zuckerberg wrote. He noted that the company has already changed some of the rules that enabled the breach, but added: “We also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it”.
Chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg shared Zuckerberg’s post and added her own comment: “We know that this was a major violation of peoples’ trust, and I deeply regret that we didn’t do enough to deal with it.”
The CEO also pledged to investigate and audit apps that accessed large amounts of data from Facebook users prior to changes in its platform in 2014, and said that it will inform users if their personally identifiable information was misused by app developers. This would include the tens of millions of people whose information was shared with Cambridge Analytica.
Source: The Guardian.
