Cambridge Analytica scandal: Mark Zuckerberg admits making mistakes

Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday admitted to making mistakes over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and said that the social media giant needs to 'step up'.

"We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it," Zuckerberg posted on Facebook.

Zuckerberg took responsibility over the breach and said that he would ensure that the platform is secure.

"I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform. I'm serious about doing what it takes to protect our community. While this specific issue involving Cambridge Analytica should no longer happen with new apps today, that doesn't change what happened in the past. We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward," he wrote.

To address current and past problems, Zuckerberg also listed out a strategy. Here is what he wrote:

- First, we will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan (Cambridge University researcher) misused here as well.

- Second, we will restrict developers' data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse. For example, we will remove developers' access to your data if you haven't used their app in 3 months. We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in -- to only your name, profile photo, and email address. We'll require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And we'll have more changes to share in the next few days.

- Third, we want to make sure you understand which apps you've allowed to access your data. In the next month, we will show everyone a tool at the top of your News Feed with the apps you've used and an easy way to revoke those apps' permissions to your data. We already have a tool to do this in your privacy settings, and now we will put this tool at the top of your News Feed to make sure everyone sees it.

Meanwhile, Cambridge Analytica, the political data firm with ties to United States President Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign, suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix, on Tuesday, amid a furor over the access it gained to private information on more than 50 million Facebook users.

The firm is accused of influencing elections by using stolen data.

The decision to suspend Nix came after a television broadcast for Britain's Channel 4 News, in which Nix suggested unseemly practices to influence foreign elections on record, according to The New York Times.

On March 21, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton took to Twitter asking everyone to delete Facebook.

Acton, whose product was bought by Facebook in 2014 for a whopping USD 16 billion, took to the microblogging platform and said "It is time. #deletefacebook" after concerns were flagged on data privacy in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica's alleged misuse of user data.

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