It’s probably fair to say that Facebook is in full-on damage control mode right about now. Still reeling from the revelation that Cambridge Analytica stealthily acquired information about millions of Facebook users as part of a broader effort to help Donald Trump win the presidential election, Facebook has been busy reassuring users that it does, in fact, care about user privacy.
Case in point: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on CNN last week and addressed the controversy head-on, telling viewers that the company would do everything in its power to ensure that something similar would never happen again.
“This was a major breach of trust, and I’m really sorry that this happened,” Zuckerberg said. “We have a basic responsibility to protect people’s data. And if we can’t do that, then we don’t deserve to have the opportunity to serve people. So our responsibility now is to make sure it never happens again.”
More recently, Facebook took out full-page ads in a number of prominent newspapers — both in the United States and the UK — apologizing once again for the incident.
The ad itself reads:
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 data 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.
Thank you for believing in this community. I promise to do better for you.
