Mark Zuckerberg Is Sorry Your Data Was Stolen and Will Actually Try to Keep It Safe Now
The public outrage over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the largest data breach in Facebook's history, has not dulled in the week since the news broke. On Sunday, Facebook took the unusual step of buying full page ads in several prominent U.S. and British newspapers in an effort to combat the PR nightmare. The apology, signed by Zuckerberg himself, gives a vague outline of how Facebook plans to move forward.
We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can't, we don't deserve it.
You may have heard about a quiz app built by a university researcher that leaked Facebook datat of millions of people in 2014. This was a breach of trust, and I'm sorry we didn't do more at the time. We're now taking steps to make sure this doesn't happen again.
We've already stopped apps like this from getting so much information. Now we're limiting the data apps get when you sign in using Facebook.
We're also investigating every single app that had access to large amounts of data before we fixed this. We expect 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.
Than you for believing in this community. I promise to do better for you.
Facebook's leadership has reason to be nervous. Politicians in the U.S. and the U.K. are calling for hearings into how the company failed to address this leak before the news became public. The fallout—assuming Congress actually follows through and demands Facebook be held accountable for their blunder with the data of 50 million people—could be huge, with new laws requiring Facebook to give users the option to make their data available rather than making that the default.
Individual Facebook users are also making their own data public to show the extent of the information that Facebook has access to. Many are reporting that the company has their contacts and phone calls: not contacts and calls made through Facebook, but the records stored directly on their phones. Sara Ashley O'Brien downloaded 14 years worth of her own data and wrote about it for CNN:
It had the phone number of my late grandmother who never had a Facebook account, or even an email address. It preserved the conversations I had with an ex—someone with whom I thought I had deleted my digital ties. It even recalled times I was "poked," a feature I had forgotten about. I also learned that Kate Spade New York and MetLife have me on their advertiser lists.
At a glance this seems like innocuous stuff: creepy, definitely, but maybe nothing that would cause people to sharpen their pitchforks. But the Cambridge Analytica debacle is only one example of how companies can manipulate and abuse that information. And it's not hard to find others.
In 2016, ProPublica discovered that Facebook's algorithms allowed advertisers to exclude users based on race when posting housing ads, and as recently as the end of last year the company hadn't changed that. And Roger McNamee, a high-profile, early investor in Facebook, wrote recently that Facebook is essentially an "unguarded platform" and an ideal target for abuse. He offers as an example a firm that was harvesting data on users interested in Black Lives Matter and selling that data to police departments; Facebook didn't do anything until the news became public, and essentially slapped the firm on the wrist. McNamee also points to the proliferation of political ads leading up to the Brexit vote, and how Facebooks algorithms easily helped Leave campaigners construct bubbles of likely voters and flood them with ads. Because the voters most likely to vote to leave were low-income, it was much cheaper to target them.
None of this seems like the activity of a trustworthy company. And as Mark Zuckerberg said himself, if Facebook can't be trusted with user data, then they don't deserve to have it.
