Facebook’s Zuckerberg apologizes for ‘major breach of trust’

NEW YORK — Breaking five days of silence, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for a “major breach of trust”, admitted mistakes and outlined steps to protect user data in light of a privacy scandal involving a US President Donald Trump-connected data-mining firm.

“I am really sorry that happened,” Zuckerberg said of the scandal involving data mining firm Cambridge Analytica. Facebook has a “responsibility” to protect its users’ data, he said in a Wednesday interview on CNN. If it fails, he said: “We don’t deserve to have the opportunity to serve people.”

His mea culpa on cable television came a few hours after he acknowledged his company’s mistakes in a Facebook post, but without saying he was sorry.

Zuckerberg and Facebook’s No 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, had been quiet since news broke on Friday that Cambridge may have used data improperly obtained from roughly 50 million Facebook users to try to sway elections. Cambridge’s clients included Trump’s generalelection campaign.

Facebook shares have dropped some 8 percent, lopping about $46 billion off the company’s market value, since the revelations were first published.

In the CNN interview, Zuckerberg offered equivocal and carefully hedged answers to two other questions. He said, for instance, that he would be “happy” to testify before US Congress, but only if it was “the right thing to do”.

He went on to note that many other Facebook officials might be more appropriate witnesses depending on what Congress wanted to know.

Similarly, the Facebook chief seemed at one point to favor regulation for Facebook and other internet giants — at least the “right” kind of rules, he said, such as ones that require online political ads to disclose who paid for them. In almost the next breath, however, Zuckerberg steered clear of endorsing a bill that would write such rules into federal law, and instead talked up Facebook’s own voluntary efforts on that front.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that there is more to do.

In his Facebook post, Zuckerberg said it will ban developers who don’t agree to an audit.

In a separate post, Facebook said it will inform people whose data was misused by apps. Facebook first learned of this breach of privacy more than two years ago, but hadn’t mentioned it publicly until Friday.

The company said it was “building a way” for people to know if their data was accessed by “This Is Your Digital Life”, the psychologicalprofiling quiz app that researcher Aleksandr Kogan created and paid about 270,000 people to take part in.

Cambridge Analytica later obtained information from the app for about 50 million Facebook users, as the app also vacuumed up data on people’s friends — including those who never downloaded the app or gave explicit consent.

Authorities in Britain and the United States are investigating.

David Carroll, a professor at Parsons School of Design in New York who sued Cambridge Analytica in the United Kingdom, said he was not satisfied with Zuckerberg’s response, but acknowledged that “this is just the beginning”.

The whistleblower who launched the scandal, Christopher Wylie, formerly of Cambridge Analytica, said he had accepted invitations to testify before US and UK lawmakers.