Perhaps you’ve heard about the full-page ad that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took out this past weekend in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, among other papers.
The headline was this: We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.
And then it went on: You may have heard about a quiz app built by a university researcher that leaked Facebook data of millions of people in 2014. This was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time. We’re now taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
We’ve already stopped apps like this from getting so much information. Now we’re limiting the data apps get when you sign in using Facebook.
We’re also investigating every single app that had access to large amounts of data before we fixed this. We expect there are others. And when we find them, we will ban them and tell everyone affected.
Finally, we’ll remind you of which apps you’ve given access to your information — so you can shut off the ones you don’t want anymore.
Thank you for believing in this community. I promise to do better for you.
And it was signed by Zuckerberg. (Terrible penmanship, by the way. I wonder if he was ever taught cursive.)
But here’s my thought about this.
Isn’t it sort of ironic that when the guy who helped to invent social media needed to apologize for his company’s missteps, he turned to one of the oldest mediums - old fashioned print newspapers - to do so?
I’m just asking.
The headline was this: We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.
And then it went on: You may have heard about a quiz app built by a university researcher that leaked Facebook data of millions of people in 2014. This was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time. We’re now taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
We’ve already stopped apps like this from getting so much information. Now we’re limiting the data apps get when you sign in using Facebook.
We’re also investigating every single app that had access to large amounts of data before we fixed this. We expect there are others. And when we find them, we will ban them and tell everyone affected.
Finally, we’ll remind you of which apps you’ve given access to your information — so you can shut off the ones you don’t want anymore.
Thank you for believing in this community. I promise to do better for you.
And it was signed by Zuckerberg. (Terrible penmanship, by the way. I wonder if he was ever taught cursive.)
But here’s my thought about this.
Isn’t it sort of ironic that when the guy who helped to invent social media needed to apologize for his company’s missteps, he turned to one of the oldest mediums - old fashioned print newspapers - to do so?
I’m just asking.
- KC's View:
