Is Mark Zuckerberg fit enough to remain as Facebook CEO?

After all that’s happened with Facebook, is Mark Zuckerberg still the right person to be the social media platform’s CEO?

Yes, so says Mark.

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has insisted he is still the right person to lead the company as it revealed 87 million users could have been affected by the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The 87 million figure includes more than a million users from the UK with the majority of those potentially affected based in the United States.

Some 1,079,031 UK users could be impacted, with more than a million Filipino and Indonesian people also potentially having their data shared improperly, Facebook said.

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In a rare conference call with journalists, the tech giant’s founder and CEO admitted that it “didn’t do enough” to protect its users and promised that the company was now committed to taking more responsibility for keeping people’s data safe.

Asked by a journalist if he still thought he was the best person to lead Facebook forward, Zuckerberg said “yes”, adding: “I think life is about learning from your mistakes and working out what you need to do to move forward.”

“When you’re building something like Facebook that is unprecedented in the world there are going to be things you mess up,” he added.

After another reporter asked if the board had discussed whether he should step down as chairman in the wake of the company’s recent drop in stock price, he said: “Not that I’m aware of.”

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Feature removed

The company said it removed a feature that let users enter phone numbers or email addresses into Facebook’s search tool to find other people. That was being used by malicious actors to scrape public profile information, it said.

“Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way,” the company said. “So we have now disabled this feature.” 

Facebook also said data on as many as 87 million people, most of them in the US, may have been improperly shared with research firm Cambridge Analytica. This is Facebook’s first official confirmation of the possible scope of the data leak, which was previously estimated at roughly 50 million. It has resulted in calls from legislators and policymakers for greater regulation of social media, helping to shave billions of dollars from the company’s market value.

Zuckerberg said 87 million was a high estimate of those affected by the breach, based on the maximum number of connections to users who downloaded an academic researcher’s quiz that scooped up personal profiles.

“I’m quite confident it will not be more than 87 million, it could well be less,” he said.

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To remedy the problem, Zuckerberg said Facebook must “rethink our relationship with people across everything we do” and that it will take a number of years to regain user trust.

“We didn’t take a broad enough view of what our responsibility was and that was a huge mistake. It was my mistake,” Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said on a conference call with reporters. “We’re broadening our view of our responsibility.” 

Zuckerberg is scheduled to appear before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committee on April 10 to discuss Facebook’s role in society and users’ privacy. 

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About 270,000 people downloaded a personality quiz app and shared information about themselves and their friends with a researcher, who then passed along the information to Cambridge Analytica, in a move that Facebook says was against its rules. Facebook reached the 87 million figure by adding up all the unique people that those 270,000 users were friends with at the time they gave the app permission. 

Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, said it licensed data on 30 million people, countering Facebook’s 87 million estimates. Cambridge Analytica said in a tweet that it “immediately deleted the raw data from our file server, and began the process of searching for and removing any of its derivatives in our system” after Facebook contacted them to let them know data had been improperly obtained.

Facebook says it will tell people, in a notice at the top of their news feeds starting April 9, if their information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.