Mark Zuckerberg’s apology: Can we still be friends?
Mark Zuckerberg has finally apologised over Facebook’s role in the misuse of data on 50 million social-media users.
Mark Zuckerberg has finally apologised over Facebook’s role in the misuse of data on 50 million social-media users, repeating promises made throughout his business career to protect personal privacy.
In an at times emotional mea culpa for a “major breach of trust”, the Facebook founder and CEO yesterday vowed to make amends to everyone from his network’s 2.2 billion active users to his daughters, aged two and seven months. “I really just care about building something that my girls are going to grow up and be proud of me for,” Mr Zuckerberg, 33, told CNN. “That’s what is kind of my guiding philosophy at this point is, you know, when I come and work on a lot of hard things during the day and go home and just ask, ‘Will my girls be proud of what I did today?’”
Facebook is enduring the greatest crisis of its 14-year history after users’ information was harvested by the voter-profiling firm Cambridge Analytica to help elect US President Donald Trump in 2016. “I’m really sorry that this happened,’’ Mr Zuckerberg said.
The value of the company has crashed 8 per cent, slicing about $US46 billion ($60bn) this week as advertisers threatened to abandon Facebook and authorities in Britain and the US launched investigations. “We have a responsibility to protect your data,” Mr Zuckerberg wrote on his own Facebook page yesterday after five days of silence over the scandal. “And if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you.”
In his post, Mr Zuckerberg said the social-media platform would ban developers who refuse to agree to an audit. An app’s developer would no longer have access to data from people who have not used that app in three months, he said.
Data would also be generally limited to user names, profile photos and email, unless the developer signs a contract with Facebook and gets user approval, Mr Zuckerberg said. In a separate post, Facebook said it would inform people whose data was misused by apps.
Since launching Facebook, Mr Zuckerberg has regularly promised to protect people’s privacy. He told CNN he was “really sorry” for weaknesses in company policies that enable third parties to misuse data on users. “I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I’m responsible for what happens on our platform,” he said. “While this specific issue involving Cambridge Analytica should no longer happen with new apps today, that doesn’t change what happened in the past. We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward.”
He suggested companies like Facebook would benefit from greater government regulation. “I’m not sure we shouldn’t be regulated,” he said. The question was what the right type of regulation was, he added.
Cambridge Analytica created psychological profiles on Facebook users via a personality prediction app created by Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology researcher at Cambridge University. About 270,000 people voluntarily downloaded the app, This Is Your Digital Life, but they were unaware the data of their Facebook friends could also be accessed.
Cambridge Analytica, which was founded by Mr Trump’s former chief strategist Steven Bannon and billionaire Republican donor Robert Mercer, used the personal data to profile what voters wanted. This reportedly included testing Trump slogans such as “drain the swamp”.
“We know that this was a major violation of people’s trust, and I deeply regret that we didn’t do enough to deal with it” Mr Zuckerberg said. “This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it.”
In 2015, Facebook found out about the Kogan app — which breached new Facebook privacy rules introduced in 2014 — and demanded that it be removed and the data destroyed.
Cambridge Analytica certified to Facebook that the data it received from the Kogan app had been destroyed but it was used to assist the 2016 Trump campaign.
Mr Zuckerberg said yesterday he would “step up” to fix the privacy issues and that he would review “thousands of apps”. “This isn’t rocket science,” he said. “We can get in front of this.”
Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia
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