Facebook Takes Out Multiple Ads Asking For Forgiveness

This was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time.

American firm Cambridge Analytica has been accused of illegally harvesting personal data from 50 million Facebook users in order to influence the last U.S. presidential election and the Brexit referendum. You’ll have to go through several steps to retrieve your data from Facebook (unless you’re willing to abandon it all).

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has taken out full-page ads in nearly all of Britain’s national newspapers to apologise for a huge data privacy scandal. When the platform discovered the stolen data, it took the firm’s word that the data had been deleted (it hadn’t).

The ad is the latest in a weeklong series of public apologies by Zuckerberg and other execs. “While we receive certain permissions from Android, uploading this information has always been opt-in only”, the world’s largest social media network said. “And we are very committed to earning it”.

“If you’re a massive organisation like that and you’re allowing access to your information, you do have a responsibility to make sure that people are following the rules you put in place”.

In an interview with CNN, Zuckerberg said that if anyone had told him in 2004 he’d be trying to stave off efforts by Russian spies in 2018 he wouldn’t have believed it. “And there’s a lot of hard work we have to do to make it harder for nation states like Russian Federation to do election interference”.

According to the ad, Facebook will be reminding users which apps they’d previously given access to, giving them the opportunity to “shut off the ones you don’t want anymore”. But Facebook is trying.

Were Zuckerberg and Sandberg forthcoming enough? No. But consider that there are more than 2 billion Facebook users, and more than 2 billion Android users. But consumers have the momentum. Facebook is once again being associated with the Russian operatives’ influence in the 2016 US presidential election.

The feature was first introduced on Facebook Messenger in 2015 and was added later on Facebook Lite. The consultancy said it did not use the data in work it did for the 2016 US election. Consumers are outraged, many to the point of quitting Facebook entirely.

The world’s largest social media platform is facing intense criticism in the USA and Europe after it was revealed users’ personal data was passed on to Cambridge Analytica, a company that worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. After months of outrage, Facebook is on the defensive.

“It’s not as though Canadians are of the view that Facebook is somehow improving the way we government or politick in this country, or that it’s improving the way we talk to each other”.

Nearly three-quarters of Canadians surveyed say recent data mining issues with Facebook will cause them to modify how they use the platform with some saying they will delete their account.