Mark Zuckerberg's Statement on Data Use by Cambridge Analytic
March 21 2018 - 4:20PM
Dow Jones News
Text of Mark Zuckerberg's Statement
I want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation
-- including the steps we've already taken and our next steps to
address this important issue.
We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't
then we don't deserve to serve you. I've been working to understand
exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen
again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent
this from happening again today we have already taken years ago.
But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step
up and do it.
Here's a timeline of the 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 enabled people to log into apps and share who their friends were
and some information about them.
In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan
created a personality quiz app. It was installed by around 300,000
people who shared their data as well as some of their friends'
data. Given the way our platform worked at the time this meant
Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends'
data.
In 2014, to prevent abusive apps, we announced that we were
changing the entire platform to dramatically limit the data apps
could access. Most importantly, apps like Kogan's could no longer
ask for data about a person's friends unless their friends had also
authorized the app. We also required developers to get approval
from us before they could request any sensitive data from people.
These actions would prevent any app like Kogan's from being able to
access so much data today.
In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan
had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is
against our policies for developers to share data without people's
consent, so we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform,
and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify
that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided
these certifications.
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 banned them from using any of
our services. Cambridge Analytica claims they have already deleted
the data and has agreed to a forensic audit by a firm we hired to
confirm this. We're 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 that.
In this case, we already took the most important steps a few
years ago in 2014 to prevent bad actors from accessing people's
information in this way. But there's more we need to do and I'll
outline those steps here:
First, we will investigate all apps 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 app with suspicious activity. 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. That includes people whose data Kogan
misused here as well.
Second, we will restrict developers' data access even further to
prevent other kinds of abuse. For example, we will remove
developers' access to your data if you haven't used their app in 3
months. We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in --
to only your name, profile photo, and email address. We'll require
developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in
order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private
data. And we'll have more changes to share in the next few
days.
Third, we want to make sure you understand which apps you've
allowed to access your data. In the next month, we will show
everyone a tool at the top of your News Feed with the apps you've
used and an easy way to revoke those apps' permissions to your
data. We already have a tool to do this in your privacy settings,
and now we will put this tool at the top of your News Feed to make
sure everyone sees it.
Beyond the steps we had already taken in 2014, I believe these
are the next steps we must take to continue to secure 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 specific 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 secure our platform further 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'd like, but I promise you
we'll work through this and build a better service over the long
term.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 21, 2018 16:05 ET (20:05 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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