Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg struggled to explain Tuesday why his company didn’t alert tens of millions of users after it first learned in 2015 that a British political consultancy had gained access to users’ personal details.
Mr. Zuckerberg said they confronted Cambridge Analytica and the university professor who first harvested the data and sold it to the consultancy, and both told Facebook they had dumped the data. That turned out not to be true.
But Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged that they never bothered to alert the users.
“We considered it a closed case,” he said. “In retrospect that was clearly a mistake.”
He was testifying to the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees Tuesday, hoping to fend off what some lawmakers say will be an onslaught of government rules and regulations designed to curtail the free-wheeling nature and self-regulation of social media companies.
Mr. Zuckerberg apologized several times during the opening of the hearing, but Sen. John Thune, chairman of the Commerce Committee, said Facebook has apologized many times since it was created in 2004, yet breaches and bungles continue to pile up.
Mr. Zuckerberg said the company’s failing in 2015 was trusting Cambridge Analytica and the professor — but lawmakers said Facebook’s decision to hush up the breach, rather than notifying the users involved, was the wrong instinct.
He said they are now going back and studying tens of thousands of other applications that had access to personal data similar to what Cambridge Analytica had. He said if abuses happened they will find out, will bad the applications from Facebook and, this time, will alert the users involved.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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