After five days, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally responded to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that began to unfold late last Friday. Naturally, it was done via a Facebook post. Unfortunately for Zuckerberg, many netizens didn’t seem too impressed.
“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” Zuckerberg said, reacting to the scandal involving the Trump campaign accessing the data of 50 million Facebook users through political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica.
Zuckerberg quickly became the talk of the internet, and is a top trend on Twitter at time of writing. Unfortunately for Facebook, it’s not received an entirely positive reaction.
Zuckerberg is “engaging apology protocol” and is very “human emotion” over the Cambridge Analytica situation. He feels “human emotion” and “regret mode”
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) March 21, 2018
Mark Zuckerberg has done the impossible. He has united the left and the right. Against him
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) March 21, 2018
The entire @facebook business model is the collection and sale of data. Mark Zuckerberg’s statement that he will just be more careful about who he sells it to, while he claims to respect your business changes nothing.
— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) March 21, 2018
Mark Zuckerberg is one of the last people you should trust, and I mean that both literally and alphabetically.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) March 21, 2018
According to Facebook, the data at the core of the scandal was originally collected by a Cambridge lecturer named Aleksandr Kogan for a personality quiz app. He collected the data legitimately, but then violated Facebook’s terms by passing the information to Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook discovered the infraction in 2015 but didn’t inform the public. Instead, the company demanded that all parties involved destroy the information. But now there are reports that not all the data was deleted. Zuckerberg said Wednesday that Kogan’s app was installed by 300,000 people. That gave Kogan access to the data of those users’ friends, too, affecting tens of millions of users. According to The New York Times, that number could be as high as 50 million.
“This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook,” Zuckerberg said. “But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that.”
Zuckerberg’s response, which you can read more about here, also added fuel to the #DeleteFacebook flame that had began to rage since the weekend.
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