(Newswire.net— March 24, 2018) — Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, said he was ready to testify before the US Congress over the misuse of personal data by millions of users of this social network that cost him more than $300bn.
Zukerberg acknowledged the error in an exclusive interview with CNN and expressed regret over the entire scandal.
“I’m really sorry that this happened,” said Zuckerberg in an interview with CNN’s Senior Technology Correspondent Laurie Segall.
Zuckerberg spoke after Cambridge Analytica, linked with the Donald Trump presidential campaign, acknowledged having access to information of 50 million FB users without their knowledge and perhaps even saved data even after Facebook ordered that company to delete it.
“It was an abuse of very important trust and I am sincerely sorry about what happened. Our responsibility is to make sure that this does not happen again,” Zuckerberg said.
Adding that the company made “mistakes”, the internet mogul stressed that he changed the company’s privacy policy to protect the data of all users.
“I wish we had taken these steps earlier. That’s … probably the biggest mistake we’ve made here,” Zuckerberg said.
The tech portal Quartz, however, reported that Apple’s cofounder Steve Jobs tried to warn Mark Zuckerberg about data security back in 2010. “A lot of people in the Valley think we’re really old-fashioned about this [data security’],” Jobs said in an interview at the d8 conference video. “And maybe we are, but we worry about stuff like this,” he adds.
Zakerberg announced that Facebook will restrict access to personal data and will notify all users whose data could be used without their consent.
Cambridge Analytica used an application developed by a Russian professor who teaches at Cambridge and St. Petersburg, Alexandr Kogan. FB announced earlier that in 2015, they learned that Kogan had given Cambridge the company’s data provided by Facebook in scientific purposes, believing that the data was erased.