MUMBAI: Mark Zuckerberg has finally broken his silence five days after the Cambridge Analytica data scandal engulfed Facebook over the weekend.
The Facebook CEO pledged on Wednesday to take a series of steps to protect data and fix what he called a "breach of trust" between the social network and its users.
"We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you," Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. "I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again."
In an interview to CNN yesterday, Zuckerberg told Laurie Segall that "I'm really sorry that this happened."
News broke this weekend that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to President Donald Trump's campaign, reportedly accessed information from about 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge.
Facebook says the data was initially collected by a professor for academic purposes in line with its rules. The information was later transferred to third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, in violation of Facebook's policies.
"I wish we'd taken those steps earlier," Zuckerberg told Segall. "That is probably the biggest mistake that we made here."
In 2014, Facebook changed its platform to limit the amount of data that third-party developers could access.
Aleksandr Kogan, the data scientist who passed along data to SCL Group and its affiliate Cambridge Analytica, built a Facebook app that drew data from users and their friends in 2013. He was allowed access to a broad range of data at the time.
Though Kogan's data was properly obtained, he breached Facebook's policy when he shared that information with a third party, Facebook has said. When Facebook learned about the information being shared, it asked Cambridge Analytica to destroy the data. Cambridge said it had.
Zuckerberg said Facebook plans to alert everyone whose data was accessed by Cambridge Analytica. But he added that he wished the company hadn't waited so long to tell people what happened.
Also Read :
