Ahead of his hearing in front of Capitol Hill today, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg once again issued an apology for failing to protect the data of tens of millions of Facebook users and laid emphasis on the new policies put into effect since the scandal was came to light by media outlets.
Zuckerberg also conceded that the multiple tools that Facebook used on its social platform was misused for unfair practices.
It was my mistake, and I’m sorry,
Zuckerberg said ahead of his appearance before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees today. He is also scheduled to appear before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Wednesday.
I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here,
the CEO added.
Zuckerberg is now set to appear at Capitol Hill after the Cambridge Analytica scandal was publicized in medias around the world. The scandal surrounded the breach of millions of users’ data by British voter profiling company, Cambridge Analytica, which campaigned for U.S President Donald Trump during the U.S Presidential Election in 2016. The British firm used information obtained from Facebook to target likely supporters of Trump during the election campaign.
Before the election, Facebook gave permission to a Russian researcher to conduct a survey via a third-party app on the social platform. The survey was filled by 200,000 users but the number of profiles affected by this app increased considerably due to the fact that it also collected data from the whole friend list of those who installed it. The information gathered was then sold to Cambridge Analytica when Trump hired their services.
The initial amount of those affected stood at 50 million users when the news first emerged last month, but the latest reports suggest that this figure actually stands at 80 million users. Cambridge Analytica claim that they had data for 30 million Facebook users out of the total 2.2 billion users the social media possess.
U.S lawmakers were left unimpressed by Zuckerberg’s apologies and expect the CEO and his company to take action.
If we don’t rein in the misuse of social media, none of us are going to have any privacy anymore,
said Bill Nelson, a Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee after a private meeting with Zuckerberg on Monday.
Facebook is determined to win back the trust of its users by informing all the users involved in the data breach. Additionally, the social media platform is encouraging its users to shut down all third party access to their Facebook accounts and is working on setting up “firewalls” to further protect the data of its users.
The United States allowed tech-giants to self-regulate their respective platforms for years by not intervening in regulating their policies but this is surely about to change according to several experts, especially since the whole scandal began from a single Russian hacker.
“At this point in time, it’s really up to Congress and the federal agencies to step up and take some responsibility for protecting privacy, for regulating Facebook as a commercial service which it clearly is,” said Marc Rotenberg, President of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. “We’ve gone for many years in the United States believing that self-regulation could work – that Facebook and the other tech giant could police themselves, but I think very few people still believe that,” he added.