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Thursday, 22 March 2018
Mark Zuckerberg apologises for Facebook's 'mistakes' over Cambridge Analytica
Mark Zuckerberg: ‘Facebook made mistakes’
Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Facebook is changing the way it shares data with third-party
applications, Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday in his first public
statement since the Observer reported that the personal data of about 50 million Americans had been harvested and improperly shared with a political consultancy.
The Facebook CEO 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”.
Facebook’s 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.”
Zuckerberg also spoke to a handful of media outlets on Wednesday, including a televised interview with CNN in which he apologized for the “breach of trust”, saying: “I’m really sorry that this happened.” In similar conversations with the New York Times, Wired, and tech website Recode,
Zuckerberg expressed qualified openness to testifying before Congress
and said that he was not entirely opposed to Facebook being subject to
more regulations.
The crisis stems from Facebook policies that allowed third-party app
developers to extract personal data about users and their friends from
2007 to 2014. Facebook greatly reduced the amount of data that was
available to third parties in 2014, but not before a Cambridge
University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan had used an app to extract
the information of more than 50 million people, and then transferred it
to Cambridge Analytica for commercial and political use.
On Saturday, Facebook’s deputy general counsel, Paul Grewal, appeared
to defend the lax policies that allowed data harvesting from unwitting
friends, writing in a statement:
“Aleksandr Kogan requested and gained access to information from users
who chose to sign up to his app, and everyone involved gave their
consent.”
But after five days of outrage from the public, and calls for
investigations and regulation from lawmakers in the US and UK, the
company appears to be acknowledging that blaming users for not
understanding its byzantine terms of service will not suffice.
The company will investigate apps that had access to “large amounts
of information” prior to the 2014 changes, Zuckerberg said, and audit
any apps that show “suspicious activity”. A Facebook spokesperson
declined to share how Facebook was defining “large amounts of
information” or how many apps would be scrutinized.Zuckerberg said in his interviews that the number of apps was in the “thousands”.The
company will also inform those whose data was “misused”, including
people who were directly affected by the Kogan data operation.
An online petition
calling for just such disclosure for people included in Kogan’s data
set had garnered more than 15,000 signatures since the weekend.
Facebook also promised to further restrict the amount of data third-party developers can access when users login
to their sites with their Facebook profile, turn off data sharing for
apps that haven’t been used for three months, and move the tool that
allows users to restrict the data they share from the Settings menu to
the News Feed.
David Carroll, a US design professor who is challenging Cambridge Analytica
through the UK courts to access his data profile harvested from
Facebook, called the reforms “inadequate”. “Users should be notified,
and not have to know to go and find out,” he told the Guardian by email.
Zuckerberg’s statement notably did not offer any explanation for why
Facebook did not make any effort to inform affected users when Guardian
reporters first told the company of the data misuse in December 2015. He
did address the question in his press interviews, acknowledging to CNN
that it was “a mistake” to rely on Kogan and Cambridge Analytica’s
certifications that they had destroyed the data.
“I
don’t know about you, but I’m used to when people legally certify that
they’re going to do something, that they do it,” he said. “We need to
make sure that we don’t make that mistake ever again.”
“With Mark Zuckerberg’s response, they are trying to convey that they
are taking this seriously, but they are reacting to furore rather than
facts,” said Jeff Hauser of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
“The facts are not new to them.”
Jonathan Albright, a research director at the Tow Center for Digital
Journalism, said that while he welcomed Zuckerberg’s explanation of how
Cambridge Analytica gained access to the data in question, he was
disappointed that the CEO did not address why Facebook enabled so much
third-party access to its users’ personal information for so many years.
“This problem is part of Facebook and cannot be split off as an
unfortunate instance of misuse,” Albright said. “It was standard
practice and encouraged. Facebook was literally racing towards building
tools that opened their users’ data to marketing partners and new
business verticals. So this is something that’s inherent to the culture
and design of the company.”
Olivia Solon and Edward Helmore contributed reporting.
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