As the reports of the data breach on Facebook surfaced, Mark Zuckerberg expressed concern over the issue and has apologized through a post on his social media account. Reportedly, a data firm named Cambridge Analytica, which had ties with Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, extracted users’ data without their knowledge and kept them even after Facebook had asked the company to delete it.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed the scandal, admitting that the company made a “mistake” and has also changed the policies to ensure data integrity.
It started in the year 2013 when data scientist Aleksandr Kogan built a Facebook app that extracted data from users and their friends. Although he obtained the data properly, he breached Facebook’s policy when he shared the data with the third party (Cambridge Analytica). As soon as it came to Facebook’s knowledge, it asked the company to destruct the data to which it agreed.
However, later it was revealed that the company didn’t actually destroy the data and now Zuckerberg regrets taking Cambridge Analytica by its word. He said in an interview that “this was clearly a mistake”. Now he plans to alert everyone whose data was leaked adding that he wished his company hadn’t waited this long.
The company Cambridge Analytica used all the data in an improper manner to build profiles of American voters and later used that to help elect Donald Trump in 2016 elections. This has raised a lot of questions on data integrity and policies of Facebook for which Zuckerberg has outlined steps taken by his company.
To counter this matter, Zuckerberg said that new policies will ban developers who don’t agree to an audit. An app developer will no longer have access to data of users who haven’t used the app for three months. The data will only be limited to usernames, profile picture, and email unless the developer attains users’ approval and signs a contract with Facebook.
Meanwhile, Indian IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad warned Zuckerberg that Indian IT Act is so stringent that Mr. Zuckerberg may even be summoned to India. However, the minister was badly trolled on twitter as everyone kept asking him if he can summon Zuckerberg then why not Nirav Modi or Vijay Mallya!
