Mark Zuckerberg said he was willing to testify to any US government inquiry over reports that Cambridge Analytica had harvested data from more than 50m Facebook accounts, and that he would not be against regulation of his social media company.
In an interview with CNN on Wednesday night, the Facebook chief executive said he realised he needed to be more public and accountable.
The interview came after he admitted the company had made mistakes over user privacy, in his first public comments since the Cambridge Analytica leaks were reported at the weekend.
“We need to make sure there aren’t other Cambridge Analyticas out there,” he told CNN, pledging to review “thousands of apps” in an “intensive process”.
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Mr Zuckerberg said he regretted not telling affected users when Facebook first found out about the leak in 2015. “I regret we didn’t do it at the time. I think we got that wrong,” he said during the TV interview.
If there was to be regulation, he would want to see the “right” type, for example more rules on transparency for online ads like those for TV. Facebook is working on a way to ensure that people can see all the ads a political campaign is running.
Reports over the weekend claimed that Aleksander Kogan, a Cambridge professor, had obtained Facebook data for research purposes and then passed the data to the analytics firm that went on to work for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
Politicians in the US, UK and Europe have called on Mr Zuckerberg to testify about the Cambridge Analytica data leak. He said on Wednesday night that he would do so if he was the person at Facebook with the most knowledge of the situation.
Telling users
Earlier, in a Facebook post, the 33-year-old founder said the company would take a series of steps to prevent a similar situation from happening again, including promising to tell users if their data had been misused.
“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” Mr Zuckerberg wrote. “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.”
Mr Zuckerberg also said Facebook was working hard to identify bad actors trying to influence the US midterm elections, and acknowledged it was not as on top of fake news and Russian interference as it should have been ahead of the 2016 election.
"We can get in front of this. We have a responsibility to do this not only for the 2018 midterms in the US, which are a huge deal this year, but there's a big election in India and Brazil and around the world," he said.
Mr Zuckerberg said Facebook learned of the data leak in 2015 and obtained “certifications” from Cambridge Analytica and Mr Kogan that they had deleted the material. He said reports that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data showed a “breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook”.
He added: “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.”
The company's board has backed Mr Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's number two, after they came under pressure for not issuing public statements earlier and for failing to appear at an internal meeting on Tuesday to address the matter.
Sue Desmond-Hellman, Facebook’s lead director, said they know how “serious the situation is” and were building stronger user protections.
“They have built the company and our business and are instrumental to its future,” she said.
Facebook shares closed up 0.7 per cent to $168.39 after falling sharply in the wake of the reports.
Tighter policy
Mr Zuckerberg said in the post that the “most important actions” to safeguard privacy on the network had been taken years ago, referring to a tightening of the policy intended to make it harder for users to expose their friends’ data.
But he vowed to do more. He said Facebook would inform users if their data were accessed by apps that may have misused it, including the ‘thisisyourdigitallife’ survey that was used to collect the data ultimately passed on to Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before the policies were changed in 2014 and will conduct an audit of any app with “suspicious activity”, he said. Any developer on Facebook that “does not agree to a thorough audit” will be banned, he said.
The social network will also impose new restrictions on developers’ access to data. If a user has not used an app in three months, for example, its developer will be denied access to the user’s data. Other apps using Facebook Login may only be allowed to access the user’s name, profile photo and email address, unless they go through Facebook’s app review process.
To increase understanding of Facebook’s privacy settings, the social network will show a notice at the top of people’s newsfeeds so they can see which other apps are accessing their data and help them revoke the permission if they want to.
Ms Sandberg wrote on the social network that she deeply regrets not having done more. “We’ve spent the past few days working to get a fuller picture so we can stop this from happening again,” she said. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2018