Jonah Haskell/ABC News(NEW YORK) — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took out ads in multiple newspapers in both the U.S. and the U.K. on Sunday to apologize for the personal data breach of over 50 million people.
“We have a responsibility to protect your information.” he wrote in the ad. “If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.”
Zuckerberg was referring to recent reports that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultant firm that worked with President Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election, had mishandled the information of millions of Facebook users.
That data was allegedly used to build psychological profiles of American voters and present them with pro-Trump material in the lead-up to election day.
Facebook has been in hot water since word of the scandal broke, facing backlash from the governments of both the U.S. and the U.K., and losing over $55 billion in market value in just a week.
In the ad, Zuckerberg went on to describe the data privacy scandal as a “breach of trust” and said he regretted not doing more to protect people’s data in the past.
But he also attempted to assure users that Facebook was taking action to prevent such a breach in the future, saying that “We’ve already stopped apps like [the one used to harvest data for Cambridge Analytica] from getting so much information,” and that the social media site is “investigating every single app that had access to large amounts of data.”
The Facebook CEO said any other apps found to be acting inappropriately will be banned from the platform.
Zuckerberg ended the apology with a promise to do better.
Jonah Haskell/ABC News
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