San Jose, California,
Mark Zuckerberg Facebook Inc. CEO Finally broke his silence on the crisis over political-advertising firm Cambridge Analytica’s access to user data on the social network, outlining concrete steps the company is taking to make sure such a leak doesn’t happen again. Critics were underwhelmed.
Zuckerberg wrote in a post on his Facebook profile page “I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again, I promise you we’ll work through this and build a better service over the long term.”
He pledged to investigate whether Cambridge Analytica still holds the information it obtained from a third-party app creator and broadening the check out to other developers that may have run afoul of Facebook’s rules; Zuckerberg took a step in the right direction, according to legislator, investors and users. But it wasn’t enough to end the criticism some remained sceptical the company is doing enough.
David Cicilline, a Democratic US representative from Rhode Island said “This isn’t going to cut it,” in a Facebook post responding to the CEO’s statement. “Mark Zuckerberg needs to testify before Congress.”
Earlier Wednesday in Washington, Facebook officials met confidentially with House Energy and Commerce Committee staffers from both sides of the political aisle for nearly two hours, according to two people who attended the meeting. One main question was whether there might be others including other “bad actors” who might have had access to the same data that Cambridge Analytica obtained from more than 50 million Facebook profiles. Staffers, speaking on the condition they not be identified, said the Facebook officials acknowledged that the company doesn’t know how widely disseminated that information might be, or how many copies were made.
The Facebook officials refused to commit to Zuckerberg come voluntarily before congressional committees said the staffers, who declined to identify the company representatives in attendance.
Zuckerberg is missing the bigger picture
Zuckerberg’s solutions focused solely on the outside developers that have accessed Facebook user details through login tools. “They’re not recognizing that they have systemic problems,” Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research, said in an interview. These are just the problems we know about, but they have ongoing problems managing different parts of their business.”
James Cakmak, an analyst at Monness Crespi Hardt & Co said “The company came up with steps to resolve the developer problems, but to garner full appreciation from the public and the market, there should be greater emphasis on why it occurred in the first place,”
