Facebook Inc. co-founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg apologized Wednesday night for the Cambridge Analytica data controversy during an interview with CNN, and said he’d be willing to testify before Congress.
“This was a major breach of trust and I’m really sorry this happened.” he said to CNN’s Laurie Segall. “Our responsibility now is to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Zuckerberg also said he would be open to testifying before lawmakers. “I’m happy to if it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “What we try to do is send the person at Facebook who will have the most knowledge. If that’s me, then I am happy to go.”
He said that in the wake of the scandal, additional user-date restrictions would be imposed on app developers, and Facebook FB, +0.74% will conduct audits of “thousands of apps” that have acquired large amounts of user data. He also said Facebook will reach out and notify any users whose data was used by Cambridge Analytica.
Earlier Wednesday, Zuckerberg broke his days-long silence concerning the scandal, in which it was revealed that the personal data of 50 million Facebook users was used by election-data company Cambridge Analytica without the users’ permission. In a Facebook post, he laid out plans to audit apps, change developers’ access to user data and add a tool for users to see what personal data apps are using.
His earlier statement did not include an apology, or signal his willingness to testify. While Facebook representatives have testified on Capitol Hill in the past, Zuckerberg himself never has.
On CNN, Zuckerberg said Facebook made a mistake in 2015, by not following up enough after learning of Cambridge Analytica’s data mining. At the time, Facebook received a formal certification that the data has been deleted. But it apparently had not been.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m used to when people legally certify that they are going to do something, that they do it. But I think this was clearly a mistake in retrospect,” Zuckerberg said. “We need to make sure we don’t make that mistake ever again.”
Zuckerberg also signaled a willingness to submit to additional regulation. “I’m not sure we shouldn’t be regulated,” he said. “There are things like ad transparency regulation that I would love to see.”
