After Days of Silence, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Admits to ‘Mistakes’ With User Data
March 22, 2018 by admin
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The growing controversy has shaken the social-media company, knocking its stock price lower and prompting renewed calls for governments to better regulate technology businesses that hold enormous quantities of information about their users.
Mr. Zuckerberg, in a post Wednesday on Facebook, said the company has already taken many steps to address user privacy in recent years, but he said “we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.”
Among the measures he said Facebook will take, the company will investigate and look for any potential abuses of personal data by app developers on its platform that have had access to large amounts of user data. Facebook also will audit any apps that display suspicious activity and notify any users affected, he said.
The investigation requires Facebook to map out how much and what kind of data was requested by app developers between 2007 and 2015, an expensive and far-reaching endeavor. Facebook will start by examining apps that had large user bases of around 100,000 people or more and those apps that pulled extensive data about a smaller group of people, according to people familiar with Facebook. The process could involve analyzing tens of thousands of apps, some of the people said.
In an interview with CNN, Mr. Zuckerberg apologized and said the company had been too trusting of developers in the past. Mr. Zuckerberg added that he would be willing to testify in front of Congress if it was the right thing to do and said he didn’t oppose some forms of regulation, specifically around ads transparency—a project that Facebook has been working on since last fall.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), who has been critical of Facebook’s response, said earlier Wednesday that the company’s leaders need to do more and Mr. Zuckerberg needs to testify. After the interview aired, she said she was “surprised” at his support for the Senate’s ad transparency efforts and called on
Twitter
Inc.
and
Alphabet
Inc.
to do the same.
“The steps Facebook has laid out to protect its users are a start but Zuckerberg still needs to come testify” before Congress, she said in a post on Twitter earlier Wednesday. “Facebook should show good faith support the Honest Ads Act. To truly regain the public’s trust, Facebook must make significant changes so this doesn’t happen again.”
Facebook’s board issued its own statement late Wednesday, from lead director Sue Desmond-Hellman, saying Mr. Zuckerberg and his No. 2, executive, Chief Operating Officer
Sheryl Sandberg,
“know how serious this situation is and are working with the rest of Facebook leadership to build stronger user protections. They have built the company and our business and are instrumental to its future.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), who has been critical of Facebook’s response, said the company’s leaders need to do more. “The steps Facebook has laid out to protect its users are a start but Zuckerberg still needs to come testify” before Congress, she said in a post on Twitter. “Facebook should show good faith support the Honest Ads Act. To truly regain the public’s trust, Facebook must make significant changes so this doesn’t happen again.”
The user-data controversy was the latest setback for Facebook, which has struggled to respond to a barrage of criticism over the past 18 months about a range of issues, including manipulation of its platform by foreign actors, the spread of fabricated news stories and user privacy.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments come days after the crisis prompted calls for him to testify before legislators in the U.S. and Europe, carved tens of billions of dollars off Facebook’s value and raised new questions about the leadership of one of the world’s most powerful technology companies.
“Facebook is exhibiting signs of systemic mismanagement, which is a new concern we had not contemplated until recently,” Pivotal Research analyst
Brian Wieser
said in a note Wednesday morning. Mr. Wieser has a “sell” rating on the stock.
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Facebook’s stock rose slightly Wednesday, after losing about 10% or $50 billion, of its market value over the past few days.
In 2007, Facebook opened its platform to developers, paving the way for dating, job-search and other apps, as well as a new style of political campaigning. The move helped the social network become a fixture in its members’ lives, catapulting the company from 58 million users to more than two billion today. It also addressed criticism from people who argued Facebook shouldn’t have sole custody over the data generated by users.
In 2014, Facebook severely restricted the data that could be available developers, including dozens of different data points about users’ friends. Those changes were implemented in 2015.
The current crisis began with Facebook’s statement Friday that it was looking into reports that data-analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked with the Trump campaign in 2016, improperly accessed and retained user data obtained from Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge.
Mr. Kogan followed Facebook rules in gathering the data but violated its policies by sharing it with Cambridge Analytica, Facebook said. Cambridge Analytica has said it complied with Facebook’s rules.
Mr. Kogan collected the data through a personality-quiz app he built for Facebook that was downloaded by about 270,000 people in 2013. At the time, Facebook’s data policies allowed developers to gather personal information about those users’ friends.
Facebook said it plans to notify the tens of millions of users whose personal information was collected by Mr. Kogan and shared with Cambridge Analytica. Reports in the New York Times and Britain’s Observer said the episode involved information on some 50 million Facebook users.
Mr. Zuckerberg on Wednesday said the transfer was a “breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that.”
Ms. Sandberg, in her own post, said “I deeply regret that we didn’t do enough to deal with it. We have a responsibility to protect your data—and if we can’t, then we don’t deserve to serve you.”
Over the weekend and early this week, senior Facebook officials spent much of the time trying to nail down what happened with Cambridge Analytica and contemplating whether and how Mr. Zuckerberg should respond, said people familiar with the matter.
The company also spent those days trying to devise a plan to secure user data collected by developers since Facebook’s 2007 decision to provide outsiders access to user data to build apps and service, according to Ms. Sandberg and other people familiar with the company.
On Wednesday, Facebook said it would audit apps that showed suspicious patterns in how they pulled certain types of data. Developers who don’t submit to a thorough audit will be banned from Facebook. Developers who misused personal user data also will be banned from Facebook and their users notified.
Facebook will further restrict data access currently available to developers, including removing developers’ access to data about users who haven’t used their apps in three months.
Some critics said the changes were too little too late. “They were effectively irresponsible years ago—now they just got caught,” said Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, a think tank focused on antitrust issues. “The government needs to actually act.”
Mr. Zuckerberg’s statement comes as Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Facebook’s user-data practices violated terms of a 2011 settlement. Users have aired their anger over social media, using the hashtag #deletefacebook. Late Tuesday, Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp, a messaging app that Facebook bought for $22 billion in 2014, appeared to join them, with a message on his Twitter account saying “It is time. #deletefacebook.” Mr. Acton has declined to comment.
The scrutiny has weighed on Facebook staff, with many questioning why Mr. Zuckerberg didn’t earlier discuss the company’s role publicly, according to current and former employees. At a question-and-answer session for employees Tuesday about the episode, Facebook lawyer Paul Grewal presided. Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg weren’t in the room.
Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg and their teams were “working around the clock to get all the facts and take the appropriate action moving forward,” a Facebook spokesman said before the executives’ statements Wednesday.
Facebook has been under fire for more than a year on a range of issues, but criticism intensified last month when special counsel Robert Mueller secured indictments against a group of Russians for manipulating Facebook and other social platforms to sow discord.
Mr. Zuckerberg had kept a low profile during this period. In the month before Wednesday’s statement, Mr. Zuckerberg has posted publicly on his Facebook page, typically his main venue for disseminating his views, only twice: once with photos of his family celebrating Chinese Lunar New Year, the other of them celebrating the Jewish holiday of Purim.
Publicly, Facebook has left it to other senior executives to make its case, often using posts on rival Twitter Inc.—a strategy that has sometimes backfired.
Executives responded to the current uproar over the weekend by arguing that what happened didn’t constitute a data breach—prompting users, privacy advocates and others to say it was missing the point.
The company stumbled in its dealings with Congress, waiting nearly two weeks last September before deciding to turn over more details of divisive ads that Russian entities paid to run on its platform during the 2016 presidential campaign. It also sent the company’s lawyer Colin Stretch rather than Mr. Zuckerberg to testify in Washington.
“Perhaps internally they felt that it didn’t rise to the level of direct involvement by the CEO,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, “but I think they realize now that while the platform has immense positive impact in the world, that it has had some significant downsides.”
Last month, Facebook’s head of advertising, Rob Goldman, drew fire when he defended Facebook’s handling of the incident and argued the Russians bought ads to exploit social divisions, not primarily to sway the 2016 election—a point that some in Washington interpreted as contradicting the indictment.
Internally, Mr. Zuckerberg has appeared to take the criticism in stride. During an employee question-and-answer session last month, Mr. Zuckerberg said Mr. Goldman’s comments didn’t reflect the company’s thinking, people familiar with his comments said, but he still backed Facebook’s strategy of having a select group of senior executives engage directly with critics, academics and journalists on Twitter and be more transparent about the company’s process and thinking.
—Robert McMillan contributed to this article.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
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Congressional Leaders Agree on $1.3 Trillion Spending Bill as Deadline Looms
March 22, 2018 by admin
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Afterward, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, issued an upbeat statement making it clear that Mr. Trump had overcome his reservations, saying that he and the congressional leaders had “discussed their support for the bill.”
The president appeared to endorse the deal late Wednesday night, even as he vented frustration about the compromises that made it possible.
“Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming,” he wrote on Twitter. “Most importantly, got $700 Billion to rebuild our Military, $716 Billion next year…most ever. Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment.”
Democrats were able to exert influence in the negotiations over the spending bill because votes from their party are needed to approve the legislation in the Senate and will most likely be needed in the House, as well.
The text of the spending bill, spanning 2,232 pages, was unveiled Wednesday night. To improve border security, the measure includes $1.6 billion for more than 90 miles of physical barriers along the border with Mexico, as well as related technology, according to congressional aides.
But there are strings attached to what can be built, and the funding is far short of the total Mr. Trump would ultimately need to build his promised “big, beautiful wall.” Some of the funding is for replacing existing barriers.
The spending bill does not resolve the uncertain fate of hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants, known as Dreamers, who have been protected under an Obama-era program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, that Mr. Trump has moved to end.
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But the president squarely put the blame on Democrats on Wednesday, writing that they “refused to take care of DACA. Would have been so easy, but they just didn’t care. I had to fight for Military and start of Wall.”
Mr. Trump’s closing of the DACA program is being challenged in court, and an effort to pass immigration legislation failed last month in the Senate.
Over the weekend, the White House offered to extend protections for DACA recipients for two and a half years in exchange for $25 billion for the border wall, according to congressional aides. Democrats countered by offering $25 billion in wall funding in exchange for a pathway to citizenship for a broader population of Dreamers, which the White House rejected.
An effort by some lawmakers to include in the spending bill a proposal to shore up insurance markets under the Affordable Care Act was unsuccessful, at least in part because of a dispute over abortion. But the bill includes a fix to the so-called grain glitch, a flaw in the sweeping tax overhaul passed last year that stood to hurt certain agricultural businesses.
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Another sticking point in recent days was funding for a series of rail infrastructure projects in the New York City area known as the Gateway program, including a new tunnel under the Hudson River. Despite his New York roots, Mr. Trump zeroed in on Gateway and urged Republican leaders not to provide federal funds for it — an apparent rebuke to Mr. Schumer, whose caucus the president has repeatedly accused of obstructionism.
The spending bill does not include $900 million in funding for Gateway that had been included last year in House legislation. But according to a senior Senate Democratic aide, it includes hundreds of millions of dollars that could go toward the Gateway program, including funds that do not require the approval of Mr. Trump’s Transportation Department.
As November’s midterm elections loom, the legislation also includes $380 million for grants to states to improve their election infrastructure and bolster election security.
And although Congress has shown little appetite for passing significant gun control legislation in response to the mass shooting last month in Parkland, Fla., the spending bill includes a modest measure to improve reporting to the national background check system for gun purchases. It also includes a measure to provide grants to improve school safety.
Congress approved a broad two-year budget deal last month that paved the way for this week’s legislation. That deal set overall spending levels, raising strict limits on military and domestic spending by a total of about $140 billion this year. The spending bill this week allocates the allowed spending among a vast array of federal programs.
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The bill is long overdue, coming almost halfway through the 2018 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1. Since then, Congress has needed five stopgap spending measures to keep the government open. By snapping that streak of short-term patches, lawmakers would provide a dose of stability to federal agencies that have been left in limbo as Congress lurched from one stopgap measure to the next.
Even with the spending bill unveiled, there is still some risk of a brief shutdown this weekend, as any one senator can stop the Senate from speeding up consideration of the bill to meet Friday’s deadline. Last month, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, did just that, causing an hourslong shutdown as he bemoaned the government’s mounting debt.
This time around, with lawmakers expected to vote on a gigantic spending bill with little time to digest its contents, Mr. Paul is unhappy yet again.
“It’s a rotten, terrible, no-good way to run your government,” he said Tuesday, adding, “Really, should we be looking in thousand-page bills with 24 hours to decide what’s in them?”
He was not the only lawmaker with such frustration.
“Whoever designed this process is not qualified to run a food truck,” said Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana. “It’s embarrassing. And as bad as it looks from the outside, you ought to see it from the inside.”
The approval of the spending bill would be another blow to those worried about the government’s ballooning debt, which has topped $21 trillion. That issue seemed of little concern on Capitol Hill as Mr. Trump and Republican lawmakers pushed for much more military funding, and Democrats demanded similar increases for domestic priorities. The spending bill will leave lawmakers from both parties with much to boast about, including billions of dollars for infrastructure and for fighting the opioid epidemic, as well as the biggest increase in military funding in years.
“This legislation fulfills our pledge to rebuild the United States military,” Mr. Ryan said after the bill was unveiled, while conceding, “No bill of this size is perfect.”
The spending spree comes on the heels of the Republicans’ tax overhaul, which was projected to add $1.5 trillion to federal budget deficits over a decade. The deficit is now expected to exceed $1 trillion in the 2019 fiscal year, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscal watchdog group.
The spending bill gave the most conservative members of Congress little to celebrate. Representative Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina and the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, expressed disappointment with the modest funding for fortifying the border.
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“It is troubling when we get a tunnel and we don’t get a wall,” he said. “The last time I checked, the president didn’t make any promises about getting a tunnel in any of his campaign stops, at least not in North Carolina.”
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