London: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg after admitting ‘mistakes’ by social media giant over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, had on Sunday took out full-page ads in almost all of Britain’s national newspapers; apologising for ‘breach of trust’. “We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t we don’t deserve it,” the back page ads stated.
Zuckerberg explained there was a quiz developed by a researcher at the University of Cambridge “that leaked Facebook data of millions of people in 2014”. Alexsandr Kogan had created a lifestyle quiz app for Facebook which was downloaded by 270,000 people, that allowed access to tens of millions of their contacts.
According to Facebook, Kogan passed the data to Cambridge Analytica without its knowledge. Meanwhile, Kogan says he is being made a scapegoat.
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Zuckerberg reiterated that Facebook had changed the rules so no such data breach could happen in future. “We’re also investigating every single app that had access to large amounts of data before we fixed this. We expect there are others,” he wrote.
The CEO in an earlier post on Facebook had assured the users that he will block developers who would try to mishandle the data. “We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps,” he said.
With agency inputs