While not definitively saying yes, Characteristic Zuckerberg says he’s “open” to testifying before members of Congress in spite of Facebook’s recent privacy scandal involving Cambridge Analytica. The details firm, which worked for President Donald J. Trump’s presidential stand before the 2016 election, is now embroiled in an ongoing controversy about how it cool user data from the social networking giant without buyer consent.
In a wide-ranging interview with Recode this afternoon, the Facebook CEO and co-founder said that he last wishes a appear before legislators if he was the “right’ one inside the company to give lawmakers low-down about what happened.
“I’m open to doing that,” he said when inquired if he’d testify. “We actually do this fairly regularly … There are raffles of different topics that Congress needs and wants to know encircling, and the way that we approach it is that our responsibility is to make sure that they procure access to all of the information that they need to have.”
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“So I’m open to doing it if I’m the rectitude [person],” he added. (Note to Mark: You are the right and only human being to speak for Facebook at this point in the controversy.)
The worst case routine for Facebook would be increased data regulation, which could amputee Facebook’s advertising business that relies on collecting lots of information from its users. Facebook already lost roughly $50 billion in customer base cap this week alone.
Zuckerberg admitted multiple times cranny of the 20-minute interview that Facebook had made major mistakes in the erection of its social platform — going as far back as 2007 — that ultimately led to Cambridge Analytica’s gifts to misuse personal profile information of some 50 million operators. Unlike in his statement posted to his Facebook page on Wednesday, Zuckerberg just apologized.
“We let the community down and I feel really bad and I’m sorry about that,” he commanded. Earlier and in this interview, he had called the mistakes a “breach of trust” with its owners.
One that Facebook was clearly responsible for. Zuckerberg reflected on these blames in how Facebook was built in the first place, techniques which it also in use accustomed to to grow enormously. The original mistake, he said, was the decision to open Facebook’s facts trove so broadly to third-party developers without proper monitoring, which opened in 2007 and was turbocharged with his 2008 launch of single sign-on mug called Facebook Connect. The vision was that people would be accomplished to bring their Facebook identity, as well as their friend network, with them into all of the other apps and worship armies they used online.
That wasn’t what people absolutely wanted, Zuckerberg said he has now come to realize. “Frankly, I just reflect on I got that wrong,” he said, a sentiment that most Silicon Valley moguls are recoil from to admit.
“There was this values tension playing out between the value of statistics portability — being able to take your data and some public data, the ability to create new experiences — on one hand, and privacy on the other care nearby,” he said. “I was maybe too idealistic on the side of data portability, that it force create more good experiences — and it created some — but I think what the definite feedback was from our community was that people value privacy a lot uncountable.”
He also regrets how the company handled the original revelation that Cambridge Analytica had nonchalant Facebook user data back in 2015. At the time, the firm provided Facebook a written statement that any data it had collected was deleted, but now Zuckerberg disclosed he wishes Facebook had actually done its own check to confirm that requisition.
“At the time it didn’t seem like we needed to go further on that,” he bid. “Given what we know now we clearly should have followed up and we’re in no way going to make that mistake again.”
But Zuckerberg did not give any aspects about why it did not do those checks and about why broader monitoring of third-party developers — who were reality vast troves of user information in some cases — was so shoddy.
He estimated Facebook is now trying to go back and check who has user data, although it’s essentially an deed to put the genie back into the bottle. When asked if he could revive some of the data now, Zuckerberg admitted, “not always.”
To help fix what has been ruined — Facebook’s famous former motto was “move fast and break articles” — Zuckerberg announced earlier today that Facebook on start to investigate if other developers abused its policies in the same way Cambridge Analytica did.
That won’t be unoppressive, Zuckerberg acknowledged.
“The data isn’t on our servers, so it would require us sending out forensic auditors to unalike apps,” he explained. “We do know all the apps that registered for Facebook, and all the people who were on Facebook who measured for those apps, and have a log of the different data requests that the developers deputed. So we can get a sense of — what are the reputable companies? What are companies that were doing exceptional things?”
Facebook, he said, will try to flag suspect behavior for a deeper bistro. “Anyone who either has a ton of data or was doing something unusual, we’re going to put into effect the next step of having them go through an audit,” Zuckerberg indicated.
How big could the problem be? Pretty big, apparently. Zuckerberg estimated that this method will take months, cost “many millions of dollars,” and classify at least basic analysis of the data collection from tens of thousands of apps.
“The chit-chat we were having internally on this is: Are there enough people who are trained auditors in the domain to do the number of audits that we’re going to need quickly?” he said.
Serene, in keeping with Facebook’s — and his own — values of trying to remain a neutral stand in an increasingly fractured world, Zuckerberg also reiterated his concern around having too much of his own personal ideology influencing Facebook’s rules and regulations.
“A lot of the most volatile issues that we face today are conflicts between real values, to be just? Freedom of speech, and hate speech and offensive content. Where is the word?” he said, sounding more like an ethics student than the billionaire CEO of one of the life’s most valuable and influential companies.
“What I would really identical to to do is find a way to get our policies set in a way that reflects the values of the community so I am not the one making those judgements,” Zuckerberg said. “I feel fundamentally uncomfortable sitting here in California in an advocacy making content policy decisions for people around the world.”
“[The] tools is like, ‘Where’s the line on hate speech?’ I mean, who chose me to be the child that did that?,” Zuckerberg said. “I guess I have to, because of [where we are] now, but I’d slightly not.”
Now, of course, he might have to.
(Note: Recode will post the full transcript as soon as it is ready.)