Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Breaks Silence On Stolen Data Scandal, Lays Out Three-Point Response

USA Today reports:

Facing growing criticism of his leadership of the social media giant he co-founded, CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally broke his silence on the escalating crisis over how Facebook handles people’s private information. Zuckerberg took responsibility for what he called “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,” he said. Zuckerberg outlined a three-point plan: investigate all third-party apps with access to large amounts of information, further restrict third party access to prevent future abuses, make sure users understand which apps they’ve given access to.

“I’m serious about doing what it takes to protect our community,” he said in a Facebook post. The remarks, coming four days after the news broke that Cambridge Analytica pilfered sensitive information from tens of millions of Facebook users, were aimed at restoring public trust in the social media giant.

From his Facebook post:



First, we will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well.

Second, we will restrict developers’ data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse. For example, we will remove developers’ access to your data if you haven’t used their app in 3 months. We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in — to only your name, profile photo, and email address. We’ll require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And we’ll have more changes to share in the next few days.

Third, we want to make sure you understand which apps you’ve allowed to access your data. In the next month, we will show everyone a tool at the top of your News Feed with the apps you’ve used and an easy way to revoke those apps’ permissions to your data. We already have a tool to do this in your privacy settings, and now we will put this tool at the top of your News Feed to make sure everyone sees it.