Mark Zuckerberg, founder and executive president of Facebook, has been facing a major headache ever since its platform was involved in a serious case of improperly sharing its s' private data. The whole scandal involving the data analysis agency Cambridge Analytica is related to the leaking of this information for misuse and possibly influencing the 2016 US election. Get the whole story here. 454w32
After four days of silence, Mark finally made a statement about the situation in a post on his social network. Check out the full translation:
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“I want to share an update on the situation at Cambridge Analytica – including the steps we have already taken and the next steps we will take to address this important issue.
We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't do that, we don't deserve to serve you. I've been studying to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure it doesn't happen again. The good news is that the most important measures to prevent it from happening again began to be taken years ago. But we also make mistakes, there is more to do, and we need to start doing it.
Here is a timeline of events:
In 2007, we launched the Facebook Platform with the vision that more apps should be social. Your calendar should be able to show your friends' birthdays, your maps should show where your friends live, and your address book should show their pictures. To do this, we allowed people to access apps and share who their friends were and some information about them.
In 2013, a University of Cambridge researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality test app. It was installed by around 300.000 people who shared their data as well as some data from their friends. Given the way our platform worked at the time, that meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of his friends' data.
In 2014, to prevent abusive apps, we announced that we were changing the entire platform to drastically limit the amount of data apps could access. More importantly, apps like Kogan's could no longer ask for data about a person's friends unless those friends also gave the app permission. We also require developers to get our approval before they can request sensitive data from people. These actions would prevent any app like Kogan from being able to access so much data these days.
In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against our developer policies for them to share data without people's consent, so we immediately ban Kogan's app from our platform, and require Kogan and Cambridge Analytica to formally certify that they have deleted all improperly acquired data. They presented these certificates.
Last week, we learned from The Guardian, The New York Times and Channel 4 that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as they had certified. We immediately ban you from using any of our services. Cambridge Analytica claims it has already erased the data and has agreed to a forensic audit from a company we have hired to confirm this. We are also working with regulators as they investigate what happened.
This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. 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 this.
In this case, we already took the most important measures a few years ago, in 2014, to prevent malicious individuals from accessing people's information in this way. But there is more to do and I will describe these steps here:
First, we will investigate all applications that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any applications with suspicious activity. We will expel any developer from our platform who does not accept to be audited. And if we discover developers who have misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and notify all people affected by those apps. This includes people whose data was misused by Kogan.
Second, we will further restrict developers' access to data to prevent further abuse. For example, we'll remove developers' access to your data if you haven't used the app for three months. We will reduce the data you provide to an app when you to just your name, profile picture and email address. We will require developers to not only get approval, but also sign a contract to request access to their posts or other private data. And we'll have more changes to share in the coming days.
Third, we want to make sure you understand which apps have allowed access to your data. Over the next month, we'll be showing everyone a tool at the top of your newsfeed with the apps you've used and an easy way to revoke those apps' permissions to access your data. We already offer this tool in your privacy settings, and now we'll put it at the top of your news feed to make sure everyone sees it.
In addition to the measures we had already taken in 2014, I believe these are the next measures we must take to continue to ensure the security of our platform.
I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform. I'm serious about doing what it takes to protect our community. While this particular issue involving Cambridge Analytica should no longer happen with new apps today, that doesn't change what happened in the past. We will learn from this experience to further secure our platform and make our community safer for everyone going forward.
I want to thank all of you who continue to believe in our mission and work to build this community together. I know it takes longer to fix all these issues than we would like, but I promise you that we will work towards this and build a better service in the long run.”
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As we can see, Mark seems willing to prevent his s' data from being shared in the way they were being shared until then, even if already in a limited way. One of the issues that the platform's founder did not mention in his post was whether the Facebook would really have had an influence on Presidential elections of 2016 from the United States.
The data obtained from s would have been used to positively influence them about Donald Trump mainly through Fake News, something that is currently being feared. Fake news is becoming a problem on the social network, managing to really suggest many people, especially in the political environment.
ing that as the elections will take place here in Brazil this year, the responsible authorities are trying their best to prevent them from having the effect they had in the North American country in 2016. Check out our article on the Fake News e check it out here.
