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Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday that he made a “huge mistake” in not focusing more on potential abuse of users’ personal information, as the social-media giant he founded revealed that data breaches were far more extensive than previously known.
Zuckerberg’s most direct mea culpa to date came as Facebook disclosed that data from as many as 87 million of its users may have been improperly shared with an analytics firm tied to the 2016 campaign of President Donald Trump, up from the 50 million previously reported. It said about 70.6 million of the users were in the U.S.
Read: Zuckerberg: #DeleteFacebook has not had effect, but it will take years to fix Facebook
Facebook FB, -0.65% released the higher figure in a statement laying out several updates to its service intended to better protect the privacy of users and increase their control over how their information is shared.
In another revelation, the company said “most people on Facebook” could have had information scraped by marketers who used a feature that distributed profile data connected to users’ email addresses and phone numbers. Facebook said it has now disabled the feature. Facebook has about 239 million monthly users in the U.S. and Canada, and 3.2 billion monthly users worldwide.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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