WASHINGTON — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday addressed the Cambridge Analytica controversy that has embroiled the company since the weekend, calling it “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,” he said in a Facebook post.
Facebook has been under fire for failing to ensure that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that worked on Donald Trump’s election campaign, destroyed information on some 50 million Americans that it improperly obtained via an academic researcher. Zuckerberg acknowledged that it first learned about violation in 2015.
The CEO also outlined a series of steps the company is taking to shore up the security of the Facebook platform, including telling users when their data has been misused and turning off data access for applications that people haven’t used within the past three months.
According to sources inside Facebook, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the situation, employees have been clamoring for Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg to personally address the situation.
