Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took out full-page ads in several newspapers to apologize for the company’s role in the unraveling Cambridge Analytica data scandal that broke last weekend. As CNET points out, the statement was published in a number of American and British papers, acknowledging that the social media platform has “a responsibility to protect your information.”
“You may have heard about a quiz app built by a university researcher that leaked Facebook data of millions of people in 2014,” the ad signed by Zuckerberg reads. “This was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time. We’re now taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
In the statement, the CEO discusses how the company intends to fix this glaring disaster moving forward. “We’ve already stopped apps like this from getting so much information. Now we’re limiting the data apps get when you sign into Facebook,” the letter continues. “We’re also investigating every single app that had access to large amounts of data before we fixed this. We suspect there are others. And when we find them, we will ban them and tell everyone affected. Finally, we’ll remind you which apps you’ve given access to your information—so you can shut off the ones you don’t want anymore."
The letter echoes previous statements made by Zuckerberg on Facebook and in an interview with the New York Times. The scandal became front page news last weekend after a whistleblower named Christopher Wylie shed light on how the data firm Cambridge Analytica mined the private information of 50 million Facebook users to design ads and content that would sway the 2016 presidential election. The story has prompted many users to delete their Facebook accounts. "Thank you for believing in this community, I promise to do better for you," Zuckerberg wrote in the ad.
