Mark Zuckerberg broke his silence on Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook CEO is admitting mistakes and outlining steps to protect user data. On Wednesday Zuckerberg took to Facebook to acknowledge about the damage and also announce about the changes to the platform designed to protect users’ data.
Zuckerberg broke his more than four days of silence through a post on his Facebook page stating that it is their responsibility to protect your data and if they are not able to then “we don’t deserve to serve you.” He continues to confirm that “at the end of the day I’m responsible for what happens on our platform,”
Facebook also affirms that it had learned about the misuse in 2015. “The Observer” newspaper in the U.K. and “The New York Times” revealed how the personal information had changed hands. “But we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.”
Facebook also announced for its plans to introduce new restrictions on user data. And to access posts on other data developers will have to get further approval from users and also sign a contract.
The timeline of the events as said in 2007, he launched the Facebook Platform with the vision that more apps should be social. By trying to do this, he enabled people to log into apps and share who their friends were and some information about them. In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app. It was downloaded by around 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends’ data. Given the way, platform worked at that time this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends’ data.
In 2014 to prevent abusive apps, Mark Zuckerberg announced that they will change the entire platform to dramatically limit the data apps could access.” Most importantly apps like Kogan’s could no longer ask for data.”
In 2015 The New York Times and Channel 4 reported that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as they had certified. Facebook immediately banned them from using any of their services. It is against the policies for developers to share data without them. Mark immediately banned them from using any of the services.
I believe these are the next steps we must take to continue to secure our platform. – Mark Zuckerberg
The steps are to mention as firstly, to investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information. Secondly, to restrict developers’ data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse. And thirdly to make sure to understand which apps you’ve allowed accessing your data.
Thus Mark takes the responsibility to fix all these issues and build a better service over the long term.
