Mark Zuckerberg has to be wishing the pokes he’s received this week were just from Facebook friends seeking his attention, not governments on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Harvard dropout who founded the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social media giant and is now its chief executive officer is grappling with growing pressure from Washington, D.C., and London to testify publicly on how British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica – a consultant on 2016 U.S. presidential campaigns including Donald Trump’s – obtained data on millions of its customers.
The information allowed holders to manipulate Facebook users by targeting their “inner demons,” according to Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge employee who recounted the events to British newspaper The Guardian. Facebook’s stock plummeted for two straight days after the revelations before starting to pare some of its losses on Wednesday as Zuckerberg addressed the mounting crisis for the first time — on the platform he created.
Admitting a “breach of trust” with users, the CEO promised new and better tools to police data. The social media giant will conduct thorough audits of any suspicious activity, he said in a Facebook post, and restrict the data provided to apps upon sign-in to name, photo and e-mail address. A tool listing all recently-used apps will be added to the top of the platform’s popular news feed, and users will be told how to revoke data access for them, he said. Additionally, developers will lose access to data from any apps not opened by a user in three months.
“I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I’m responsible for what happens on our platform,” Zuckerberg said. “I promise you we’ll work through this and build a better service over the long term.”
The post garnered 47,000 likes Wednesday afternoon, representing than less than 1 percent of Zuckerberg’s 105 million followers. How his comments will be received by regulators and lawmakers remains to be seen.
In the U.S., Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has scheduled a briefing with Facebook staff as he considers a request from committee members Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, to summon Zuckerberg and the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter to Washington for a hearing.
The three firms “have amassed unprecedented amounts of personal data and use this data when selling advertising, including political advertisements,” Kennedy and Klobuchar wrote. “The lack of oversight on how data is stored and how political advertisements are sold raises concerns about the integrity of American elections as well as privacy rights.
Grassley hasn’t yet decided whether to hold a hearing or if one would be at the full committee or subcommittee level, according to his office.
As for Facebook, “We are in the process of conducting a comprehensive internal and external review,” Deputy General Counsel Paul Grewal said in a statement. “That is where our focus lies as we remain committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people’s information.”
In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee in Parliament’s House of Commons accused Facebook of misleading authorities about the risks to user data and requested that Zuckerberg come to London for a meeting.
“There is a strong public interest test regarding user protection,” committee chair Damian Collins wrote to the Facebook chief. “Accordingly, we are sure you will understand the need for a representative from right at the top of the organization to address concerns. Given your commitment at the start of the New Year to ‘fixing’ Facebook, I hope that this representative will be you.”
The government scrutiny only increases the challenges facing a company already beset by concerns that phony news articles on its site were used to influence elections around the globe. Privacy has been a focus since at least 2011, when Facebook reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. over allegations that the social media platform had repeatedly shared data that it told users would be kept confidential.
Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who serves on the Intelligence Committee, sent Zuckerberg a series of detailed questions including whether other companies had violated Facebook’s policies in the past decade and what steps Facebook took to identify and inform users whose information was co-opted by Cambridge Analytica.
“The ease with which Cambridge Analytica was able to exploit Facebook’s default privacy settings for profit and political gains throws into question not only the prudence and desirability of Facebook’s business practices and the dangers of monetizing consumers’ private information, but also raises serious concerns about the role Facebook played,” Wyden wrote.
“With little oversight — and no meaningful intervention from Facebook – Cambridge Analytica was able to use Facebook-developed and marketed tools to weaponize detailed psychological profiles against tens of millions of Americans,” he wrote.
Facebook, whose digital platform is used by more than 1 billion people a day, disclosed Friday that it suspended the accounts of Cambridge Analytica and its parent Strategic Communications Laboratories after learning that the companies may not have deleted data improperly shared by Dr. Aleksandr Kogan.
Kogan, a University of Cambridge psychology professor, obtained the data through his app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” which used Facebook Login. About 270,000 people downloaded the software, advertised as a research tool used by psychologists, giving their consent for Kogan to access information such as their location, content they had liked and limited data on friends whose privacy settings allowed access, Facebook said.
Although Kogan obtained the information using the same techniques as other app developers on Facebook at the time, he violated the company’s policies by sharing it with SCL, Cambridge Analytica, and Wylie, the whistleblower, Facebook said.
The company demanded those parties destroy the data in 2015, when it learned what had happened, and each said they had done so. This month, the company said, it learned that some of the data might have been kept and promised to vigorously enforce its policies – through legal action, if necessary.
Cambridge Analytica, which was paid $5.9 million by President Trump’s campaign in the 2016 election and nearly that amount by his Republican primary rival Ted Cruz, said it complies with all Facebook’s rules and is working to resolve the company’s concerns as quickly as possible.
Cambridge blamed the earlier issues on a contractor, promised to cooperate with the U.K. Information Commissioner’s investigation into the matter and suspended CEO Alexander Nix. Nix incurred the ire of Cambridge’s board after he was recorded telling an undercover reporter for BBC Channel 4 that the firm had expertise in using tapes of sexual encounters and too-good-to-be-true offers to damage politicians.
