Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, and CEO of Facebook revealed shocking news during the testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee that even his personal data was taken and sold by UK based analysis firm Cambridge Analytica.
87 million users personal data harvested by the company is used for political purposes in the US presidential elections. In which half of the million data of Indian users.
During the series of questions asking by the committee, Zuckerberg was asked if his personal data was included in the information sold to the “malicious third parties” to which he replied “yes”.
As per the guidelines are given by the US Congress committee, Facebook has started to notify those users whose data have been breached.
Zuckerberg said, “it is going to take some time to work through all the changes it needs to make. But I am committed to getting this right, and that includes the basic responsibility of protecting peoples information, which we failed to do with Cambridge Analytica,”.
He added that he personally getting to the bottom of exactly what Cambridge Analytica did, and telling everyone who may have been affected.
“What we know now is that Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained some information about millions of Facebook members by buying it from an app developer that people had shared it with,” he said.
“This information was general information that people share publicly on their profile pages, like their name and profile picture and the list of pages that they follow. When we first contacted Cambridge Analytica, they told us that they had deleted the data. And then, about a month ago, we heard a new report that suggested that this was not true,” he said.
Now the Facebook is working with governments in the USA, India, Singapore and around the world to do a full audit of the data theft.
On the question of selling data? Zuckerberg asserted that Facebook does not sell any data. Facebook is neither a media or a financial institution. That’s not how advertising works, and I do think we could probably be doing a clearer job explaining that given the misperceptions that are out there. I consider us to be a technology company because the primary thing that we do is have engineers who write code and build products and services for other people,” he said.
I accepted that we (Facebook) didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm, as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.