Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Breaks Silence, Set For Prime Time Interview Amid User Data Scandal

Mark Zuckerberg finally broke his silence Wednesday amid a firestorm of criticism surrounding Facebook’s handling of private user data. 

Zerohedge reported on key aspects of Zuckerberg’s statement:

While we repost the full statement below, the following excerpts are key:

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.

Translation: Facebook never did audits of what apps have access to user data to determine if they complied with the TOS. Which is perfectly understandable: after all Facebook is in the “selling user data” business not “protecting user data” business.

And then there was this:

I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I’m responsible for what happens on our platform. I‘m serious about doing what it takes to protect our community. 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.

Click here to read the full statement.

Zuckerberg is set to appear on CNN for an interview with Laurie Segall at 9:00 PM EST tonight.

Federal investigators have begun probing Facebook’s use of personal data after reports surfaced that Cambridge Analytica ‘improperly gained access to the data of more than 50 million users.’

CNBC reports:

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether the use of personal data from 50 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica violated a consent decree the tech company signed with the agency in 2011, Bloomberg reported Monday. […]

“We are aware of the issues that have been raised but cannot comment on whether we are investigating. We take any allegations of violations of our consent decrees very seriously as we did in 2012 in a privacy case involving Google,” a spokesman for the FTC said Tuesday.

A violation of the consent decree could carry a penalty of $40,000 per violation, which could mean a fine conservatively estimated to be “many millions of dollars in fines” for Facebook, The Washington Post reported over the weekend, citing a former FTC official.

“We reject any suggestion of violation of the consent decree. We respected the privacy settings that people had in place. Privacy and data protections are fundamental to every decision we make,” the social network giant said in a statement to the Washington Post over the weekend.

Despite the media hoopla, reports of parties improperly obtaining Facebook user data is not a new phenomenon.

On Sunday, a former Obama campaign official admitted that Facebook allowed the Obama campaign to mine data from the social media giant because “they were on our side.”

Independent Journal Review reported:

In a Sunday tweet thread, Carol Davidson, former director of integration and media analytics for Obama for America, said the 2012 campaign led Facebook to “suck out the whole social graph” and target potential voters. They would then use that data to do things like append their email lists.

 

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