Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg vowed Wednesday to "step up" to fix problems at the social media giant, as it fights a snowballing scandal over the hijacking of personal data from millions of its users.
"We have a responsibility to protect your
data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you," Zuckerberg
said, in his first public comments on the harvesting of Facebook user
data by a British firm linked to Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.
Writing on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg announced new steps to rein
in the leakage of data to outside developers and third-party apps, while
giving users more control over their information through a special
toolbar.
Zuckerberg said measures had been in place since 2014 to prevent precisely the sort of abuse revealed at the weekend.
"But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it," he said.
The scandal erupted when a whistleblower revealed that British data
consultant Cambridge Analytica (CA) had created psychological profiles
on 50 million Facebook users via a personality prediction app, created
by a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan.
The app was downloaded by 270,000 people, but also scooped up their
friends' data without consent -- as was possible under Facebook's rules
at the time.
Facebook says it discovered last week that CA may not have deleted the data as it certified.
"This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and
Facebook," Zuckerberg wrote. "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."
"We need to fix that."
- Probe by special counsel? -
Zuckerberg's admission follows another day of damaging accusations
against the world's biggest social network as calls mounted for
investigations on both sides of the Atlantic.
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