“I’m really sorry that this happened,” the Facebook CEO told CNN’s Laurie Segall in an exclusive TV interview. News broke this weekend that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, accessed information from 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge, and might have kept that data even after Facebook told the company to delete it. The revelation put Facebook and Zuckerberg under the microscope for their handling of user data and privacy.
Zuckerberg addressed the scandal publicly through a Facebook post on Wednesday. He wrote that the company made “mistakes” and outlined how it has changed its policies to make sure that user data is protected. “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.
But a former contractor, Christopher Wylie, disputes that Cambridge Analytica destroyed the user data. Zuckerberg told Segall that he regrets taking Cambridge Analytica at its word. “This was clearly a mistake,” he said. Zuckerberg said Facebook plans to alert everyone whose data was accessed by Cambridge Analytica. But he added that he wishes the company hadn’t waited so long to tell people what happened. “That’s definitely something that, looking back on this, I regret that we didn’t do at the time,” he told CNN. “I think we got that wrong.” And he said he’s made other mistakes along the way.
“I started this when I was so young and inexperienced,” the 33-year-old Zuckerberg said. “I made technical errors and business errors. I hired the wrong people. I trusted the wrong people,” he said. I’ve probably launched more products that have failed than most people will in their lifetime.”
But ultimately, he said, he’s learned from his missteps. That’s the commitment that I try to have inside our company, and for our community.” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg come out with a detailed response to the crisis rocking his platform over the manner a political data firm Cambridge Analytica squeezed out users information and allegedly used same to influence the outcome of the US presidential electiins in 2016.
Zuckerberg in a post on Facebook admitted responsibility for what Data Analytica used his platform to doHe said the primary responsibility of the social media platform ordinarily ought to be to protect users data. He also admitted, that where that did not happen is a fault on his part and promised to work hard to correct the mistakes and lead a strong platform that infilterators may not have access to.b Zuckerberg however said that the company has taken several measures against what happened but that having found out they were not enough, he will ensure stricter measures are deployed soonest even without making it difficult for users to have fluid, robust and friendly access to the platform.
On his Facebook page, Zuckerberg said:
“I want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation — including the steps we’ve already taken and our next steps to address this important issue. We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you. I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it”. He released a timeline of the events preceding the Cambridge Analytica access to users data, an incident that has now turned a scandal for the social media platform housing billions of users all over the world.
According to him: “In 2007, we launched the Facebook Platform with the vision that more apps should be social. Your calendar should be able to show your friends’ birthdays, your maps should show where your friends live, and your address book should show their pictures. To do this, we enabled people to log into apps and share who their friends were and some information about them. In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app. It was installed by around 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends’ data. Given the way our platform worked at the time this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends’ data.
