Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he does not think a significant number of people have committed to the #DeleteFacebook movement trending this week amid a data security controversy.
But he did admit the movement was a sign that reports concerning improper data harvesting by Cambridge Analytica was a “major trust issue” for Facebook users.
“I don’t think we’ve seen a meaningful number of people act on that, but, you know, it’s not good,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with the New York Times on Wednesday. “I think it’s a clear signal that this is a major trust issue for people, and I understand that. And whether people delete their app over it or just don’t feel good about using Facebook, that’s a big issue that I think we have a responsibility to rectify.”
Facebook did not respond to the Washington Examiner‘s request for comment earlier in the day for a figure of how many Facebook users have deleted their accounts.
Zuckerberg’s remarks come after it was reported late last week that Cambridge Analytica, which worked for President Trump’s campaign during the 2016 presidential contest, may have kept data it had obtained from the Facebook profiles of millions of accounts. The information was then used to sway voters in the 2016 election.
Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post Wednesday afternoon that his company would cooperate with a forensic audit to determine if Cambridge Analytica had deleted the information it previously certified to Facebook it had deleted.
“This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post Wednesday, referring to Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University researcher who worked with the analytics firm. “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.”
Zuckerberg also said that developers’ access to data would be restricted and users would not be required to provide as much information to login to apps.
Facebook announced last Friday that Cambridge Analytica, it’s parent company Strategic Communication Laboratories, Cambridge Analytica employee and whistleblower Christopher Wylie, and others would be suspended from Facebook in response to the reports that not all data that had been obtained had been properly deleted.
Cambridge Analytica has denied that it did anything improper with Facebook data.
