Mark vows to bolster privacy amid crisis

San Francisco: Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, on Wednesday publicly addressed for the first time the misuse of data belonging to 50 million users of the social network and described the steps the company would take to safeguard the information of its more than two billion monthly users.

Although his statement addressing a chorus of criticism fell short of a full-throated apology, Zuckerberg said that Facebook would contact users whose data had been harvested through a personality quiz app and passed along to the political data firm Cambridge Analytica.

"We have a responsibility to protect your data," Zuckerberg said on Wednesday in a Facebook post, "and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you".

Zuckerberg, 33, was trying to quell the crisis over the disclosure last weekend that Cambridge Analytica had used data that had been improperly obtained from Facebook as the firm worked on behalf of Donald J. Trump's presidential campaign.

"Are there other Cambridge Analyticas out there?" Zuckerberg said later in an interview with The New York Times. He added, "Were there apps which could have got access to more information and potentially sold it without us knowing or done something that violated people's trust? We also need to make sure we get that under control."

Zuckerberg said the company would investigate apps like the third-party quiz app that had previously obtained access to "large amounts of information" from the social network. He also said the company would restrict third-party developers' access.

"We also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it," he wrote in his Facebook statement.

The Cambridge Analytica revelations added to the questions that have been raised about Facebook's handling of user data and security. Those questions have only intensified as the company has faced criticism over the role its platform played in Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election and the way it has been used to spread misinformation on the Internet.

The resulting backlash is Facebook's worst crisis since it was founded by Zuckerberg and others in 2004. The information, photos and other content that users post and their frequent engagement with the platform is crucial to the social network, and to the company's profitability.

Questions about user privacy and security threaten the company's standing at a time when people are already uneasy about whether the use of technology can bring good or ill.

Last Friday, after The New York Times, The Observer of London and Channel 4 in Britain told Facebook that Cambridge Analytica had not deleted all the data it had obtained, the social network banned the political consulting firm and Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University researcher who created the personality quiz app that was used to harvest user data.

"This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook," Zuckerberg wrote on Wednesday. "But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it."

Facebook representatives confirmed that Cambridge Analytica representatives met Facebook on Tuesday to discuss lifting the ban. Zuckerberg told The Times he did not rule out allowing Cambridge Analytica back, saying Facebook must first conduct a "full forensic audit of the firm" and "have full confirmation that there's no wrongdoing here".

The reaction to the Cambridge Analytica disclosure has been severe. Politicians in the US and Britain have called for Zuckerberg to explain how his company handles user data, and state attorneys general in Massachusetts and New York have begun investigating Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. A #DeleteFacebook movement calling on people to close their accounts has also gathered steam.

In Washington, there have been more calls for regulation of Internet companies like Facebook. Zuckerberg's troubles there were illustrated by the final passage on Wednesday of a bill to combat sex trafficking. The bill would lift liability protections that Internet companies have enjoyed for content that users post on their platforms.

NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE