Zuckerberg Blames Himself, Outlines Abuses in Cambridge Analytica Scandal
After a data scandal affecting some 87 million platform users, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg blamed himself for not taking a “broad enough view of our responsibility.” The remarks come in testimony prepared for presentation to Congress Wednesday in which he also casts blame on scholar Aleksandr Kogan and Cambridge Analytica.
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“It’s not enough to just give people a voice, we have to make sure people aren’t using it to hurt people or spread misinformation,” Zuckerberg is set to tell the House Commerce Committee (see 1804050024). The Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees will question Zuckerberg Tuesday. “It’s not enough to give people control of their information, we have to make sure developers they’ve given it to are protecting it, too.”
Zuckerberg says this is how the scandal played out: Cambridge University researcher Kogan created a personality quiz in 2013. The application was installed by some 300,000 Facebook users, who agreed to share information about themselves and their friends based on their privacy settings. This gave Kogan access to information from tens of millions of users. Facebook in 2014 announced changes to limit the information that apps could mine, blocking access to friends’ information without the friends' consent. Facebook learned in 2015 that Kogan had shared the data with Cambridge Analytica. The platform banned Kogan’s application and demanded that all parties delete the data, which was agreed to, but Facebook learned in 2018 that Cambridge Analytica might not have deleted the data.
Facebook is now investigating every application that accessed large data troves before 2014, Zuckerberg says in his prepared testimony, and suspicious activity will be met with full forensic audits. “If we find that someone is improperly using data, we’ll ban them and tell everyone affected,” he says. Facebook is also acting to limit the types and amount of data applications can access, and requiring developers to sign contracts with new consent requirements, he says.
Zuckerberg admits struggles with fake news, foreign interference in elections, hate speech and data privacy, but he also lists positive contributions from the platform: Facebook played a large role in the women’s #MeToo movement, the March for Our Lives and raising more than $20 million for Hurricane Harvey relief, he says.
On consumer privacy protections, Facebook and other online platforms should follow the example of broadband providers, who exercised strong “pro-consumer” policies, USTelecom CEO Jonathan Spalter said Monday. Those policies concern transparency, choice, security and notification in data breaches, he said. “On privacy, on openness, on all these important issues -- consumers and innovators alike deserve one set of protections and rules of the road,” Spalter said, saying Congress should pursue a “modern framework” to address online privacy.
Meanwhile, Charter CEO Tom Rutledge blogged Monday that Congress should pass internet privacy protections that cover all internet companies and require entities to get "opt-in" consent to collect and share data for uses other than the actual services in which they're engaged. He also said online entities need to be transparent about their information collection and sharing practices. He said differing privacy policies that lead to inconsistent protections "sow confusion and erode consumer confidence in their interactions online."