Facebook chief calls scandal a « breach of trust » and outlined preventative steps the company is taking.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took out full-page ads in several newspapers in the US and UK on Sunday to apologize for his company’s involvement in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
« You may have heard about a quiz app built by a university researcher that leaked Facebook data of millions of people in 2014, » Zuckerberg said in the signed ads, referring to the data analytics firm of accused of misusing Facebook data during the 2016 US election.
« This was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time. We’re now taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again, » he wrote in the ad, which appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal as well as the UK’s The Observer, The Sunday Times, Mail on Sunday, Sunday Mirror, Sunday Express and Sunday Telegraph.
The ad echoes comments Zuckerberg made Wednesday after the controversy that knocked almost $50 billion off the company’s value last week.
The ads, which didn’t mention Cambridge Analytica by name, sought to reassure users that Facebook had already taken steps to prevent a similar privacy breach from occurring in the future.
« We’re also investigating every single app that had access to large amounts of data before we fixed this. We expect there are others, » Zuckerberg said. « And when we find them, we will ban them and tell everyone affected. »
Cambridge Analytica was thrust into the spotlight last week when a whistleblower who formerly worked at the company told The Guardian and The New York Times that it had exploited the personal data of millions of Facebook users. The company is accused of holding on to the data after Facebook asked it to delete the files, and then using the information to manipulate US voters in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Cambridge Analytica has denied using Facebook data it received through a third-party research agency in its work with the Donald Trump campaign during the election.
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