Zuckerberg Reiterates Obligation to Privacy
For much of the past week, Facebook has been embroiled in a controversy involving Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm with ties to Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, and how it improperly obtained and exploited personal data from 50 million Facebook users.
Posted — UpdatedFor much of the past week, Facebook has been embroiled in a controversy involving Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm with ties to Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, and how it improperly obtained and exploited personal data from 50 million Facebook users.
On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, spoke with New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Kevin Roose about the controversy and the steps he was taking to make Facebook less prone to abuse. Edited excerpts from the conversation follow.
The second thing is, the most important thing is that we fix this system so that issues like this don’t happen again. It’s not like there aren’t going to be other different kind of things we’ll also have to fix. But when there’s a certain problem, we have a responsibility to at least make sure we resolve that problem.
So the actions here that we’re going to do involve first, dramatically reducing the amount of data that developers have access to. The most important actions there we actually took three or four years ago. But when we examined the systems this week, there were certainly other things we felt we should lock down, too.
Even if you solve the problem going forward, there’s still this issue of: Are there other Cambridge Analyticas out there, or other Kogans who, when the platform worked a certain way in the past? Were there apps which could have gotten access to more information and potentially sold it without us knowing, or done something that violated people’s trust? We also need to make sure we get that under control. That’s why we spent a lot of time figuring out, OK, here’s what it’s going to take to do a full investigation of every app that got access to a large amount of information before we changed the platform policies to dramatically reduce the data access that developers had. For any app that we uncover that has any suspicious activity, we’re going to go do a full forensic audit and make sure we have the capacity to do that, to make sure that other developers aren’t doing what Kogan did here.
The third thing is, it’s really important that people know what apps they’ve authorized. A lot of people have been on Facebook now for five or 10 years, and sometimes you signed into an app a long time ago and you may have forgotten about that. So one of the steps we’re taking is making it so apps can no longer access data after you haven’t used them for three months.
We took action immediately at that point. We banned Kogan’s app from the platform, we demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica and a couple other parties that Kogan had shared the data with would legally certify that they didn’t have the data, and weren’t using it in any of their operations. They gave us that formal certification. At the time, they told us they never had gotten access to raw Facebook data, so we made that decision.
Now, the good news here is that these problems aren’t necessarily rocket science. They’re hard, but they’re things that if you invest and work on making it harder for adversaries to do what they’re trying to do, you can really reduce the amount of false news, make it harder for foreign governments to interfere.
One of the things that gives me confidence is that we’ve seen a number of elections at this point where this has gone a lot better.
In 2017 with the special election in Alabama, we deployed some new AI tools to identify fake accounts and false news, and we found a significant number of Macedonian accounts that were trying to spread false news, and were able to eliminate those. And that, actually, is something I haven’t talked about publicly before, so you’re the first people I’m telling about that.
I feel a lot better about the systems now. At the same time, I think Russia and other governments are going to get more sophisticated in what they do, too. So we need to make sure that we up our game.
Now, over time, might there be ways for people who can afford it to pay a different way? That’s certainly something we’ve thought about over time. But I don’t think the ad model is going to go away, because I think fundamentally, it’s important to have a service like this that everyone in the world can use, and the only way to do that is to have it be very cheap or free.
If you had asked me, when I got started with Facebook, if one of the central things I’d need to work on now is preventing governments from interfering in each other’s elections, there’s no way I thought that’s what I’d be doing, if we talked in 2004 in my dorm room.
Copyright 2024 New York Times News Service. All rights reserved.