Zuckerberg: Cambridge scandal appears to have no impact on Facebook use
The Cambridge scandal does not seem to have any impact on the number of users or the use of Facebook for the time being. That says director Mark Zuckerberg in an interview with mainly American journalists.
The scandal surrounding the misuse of the data of up to 87 million Facebook users has “no significant impact that we have observed,” Zuckerberg said in the interview. Zuckerberg did not provide further figures on usage, but usage of the social network was already on a declining trend before news of the privacy scandal came out.
Facebook is in the process of taking action in response to the scandal. For example, it is now no longer possible to search Facebook by name or email address, even if users have that data public. This made it possible to scrape public information from many users. Facebook tried to prevent scraping with a limit on searches per IP address, but that didn’t help. “We saw some people using hundreds of thousands of IP addresses to get around the limit and that was a problem for which we don’t have a solution. If you had your information public, you have to assume that there were people who took your information. scraped info.”
According to Zuckerberg, Facebook has taken too little responsibility in recent years for the misuse of data that the social network facilitated. “We didn’t focus enough on countering abuse and thinking about how people could use our tools to do harm. That goes for fake news, foreign influencing elections and hate speech in addition to developers and privacy. We didn’t look broad enough at what is our responsibility and that was a big mistake. That was my mistake.” Despite the mistakes, Zuckerberg feels he can continue to run Facebook. “I think life is all about learning from your mistakes and figuring out what to do to keep moving forward.”
Facebook’s problems aren’t going away anytime soon, Zuckerberg says. “I wish I could snap my fingers and all these problems would be gone in three or six months. The reality is, given the complexity of Facebook and the amount of systems, we need to rethink our relationship with people and our responsibility in everything we do.”
Zuckerberg will appear before Congress next week to explain the misuse of user data. The Cambridge Analytica scandal has already had many consequences in recent weeks. Facebook closed Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook account, reduced the amount of data that apps and games get, and foreman Mark Zuckerberg apologized with a post on Facebook, in interviews and recently with full-page advertisements in British newspapers.