Mark Zuckerberg has rejected calls for heads to roll at Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, saying that he takes full responsibility.
Speaking after Facebook’s fullest statement yet about the data breach, which the company now says resulted in 87m profiles being extracted from the platform, Zuckerberg insisted he remained the correct person to run the company.
“At the end of the day, this is my responsibility. So there have been a bunch of questions about [firing staff]. I started this place. I run it. And I am responsible for what happens here.
“I still think that I’m going to do the best job to help run it going forward. I’m not looking to throw anyone else under the bus for mistakes that we’ve made here.”
In a blogpost that preceded Zuckerberg’s statement, the company also admitted “most” of Facebook’s 2 billion users had had their profile data scraped, in a data-harvesting operation entirely separate to the issue that allowed Cambridge Analytica to gather data.
Until Wednesday, users could look up Facebook profiles by entering an email or phone number. However, the company’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, said, “malicious actors have also abused these features to scrape public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses they already have through search and account recovery”.
“Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way. So we have now disabled this feature.”
As Facebook gears up for the introduction of the EU’s general data protection regulation (GDPR), the company is also having to be more careful about how it deals with data-harvesting operations, says Lukasz Olejnik, an independent security and privacy researcher and consultant. “The functionality of uncontrolled and unaccounted siphoning of data is not exactly in line with GDPR in general,” he notes.
