Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologised for the data debacle that has upended the social media giant and said he was ready to testify before Congress, which he never did in the past.
"The short answer is I'm happy to if it's the right thing to do," Zuckerberg told CNN on Wednesday night. "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.
Although Facebook employs a small army of lawyers and lobbyists in Washington, Zuckerberg himself has never testified before the Senate or any congressional committee. Now lawmakers are keen to see Zuckerberg testify before their legislative bodies in the five days since the Cambridge Analytica scandal erupted.
The Cambridge Analytica, a global data firm, which has ties to President Donald Trump's campaign, reportedly accessed information from about 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge and used it to influence them during the election campaign, CNN reported.
Facebook has said that the data was actually collected by a professor citing academic research but it was later transferred to third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, in violation of Facebook's policies.
Zuckerberg, who broke his silence after a week, posted on his personal Facebook page laying out a series of steps the company would take to better protect user data. "I want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation ... I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again," he wrote.
"The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it," he noted in his post.
even in his CNN interview, Zuckerberg said the question was not whether Facebook should be regulated so much as how best to do it. "I'm not sure we shouldn't be regulated. There are things like ad transparency regulation that I would love to see," he said.
Social media is abuzz over his Facebook post, which was short of an outright apology and soon he sought to rectify it in the CNN interview. "This was a major breach of trust, and I'm really sorry that this happened... We have a basic responsibility to protect peoples' data," said the CEO of Facebook.
He vowed to restrict developers' access to user data and also investigate all apps with access to large amounts of user data. Of course, Zuckerberg is now regretting for not doing much against Cambridge Analytica though it came to the company's attention in 2015.
"We need to make sure we don't make that mistake ever again," said Zuckerberg in his interview to CNN.
