Facebook Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg has apologized in the wake of the recent data breach of over 50million users.
The tech giant said that the world’s largest social network “made mistakes” which led to millions of Facebook users’ data being misused by a political consultancy.
Zuckerberg admitted that a “breach of trust” has taken place and that he’ll take strong steps to protect user data.
In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app which was installed by 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends’ data. Given the way the platform worked at the time, this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends’ data.
However, in 2015, Facebook learned from a section of the media that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against Facebook’s policies for developers to share data without people’s consent, so, the platform immediately banned Kogan’s app and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data.
But it later emerged that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as they had earlier certified. Both parties have however agreed to a forensic audit by a firm hired to confirm the true state. Regulators have also been called in for further investigation.
New Steps from Facebook
- Going Forward, Facebook has promised to investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before the changed in its platform in 2014, and will also conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity.
- Restrictions will also be placed on developers’ data access to prevent other kinds of abuse developers and will not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data.
- Lastly, next month, Facebook will introduce a new tool that will show everyone at the top of their news feed with the apps they have used and an easy way to revoke those apps’ permissions to their data.
The Facebook’s co-founder and CEO reportedly lost $6.06 billion in stock value, according to CNBC, in the wake of the data breach.
See details of the apology here
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