After five long days of silence, Mark Zuckerberg has finally spoken about the ongoing Cambridge Analytica revelations.
In a nearly 1,000-word-long Facebook post, the firm’s co-founder went to great lengths to explain how he’d already fixed all the problems that led to the unauthorised use of data from 50 million Americans by a political consultancy working for Donald Trump. What he doesn’t get around to doing, however, is actually apologising for the leak.
You can read Zuck’s statement here, but to work out what he’s really saying we ran the entire statement through our our Tech Bro Translator.
I want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation
Zuck’s use of “I want to share an update” is fairly liberal here, given that he’d already waited until five days after the Cambridge Analytica news broke to actually give this statement. If he’d really wanted to share an update, he might have done it a little sooner.
We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you.
Facebook does have a huge responsibility over its users’ data. It’s the firm’s lifeblood, and a large part of the reason why it managed to rack up $39.9 billion dollars in advertising revenue over the last year.
The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago.
Here, Zuck seems to be telling us that he’s already fixed the problem. Now, I don’t want to call bullshit on this exactly, but something about this whole situation is hinting to me that everything hasn’t quite been resolved.
But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it.
This is the closest in the 935 word statement that Zuck comes to actually making an apology. It is, however, most definitely not a proper apology. What it is, is the most Silicon Valley of statements that amounts to “We messed up, but we’re going to fix it for next time, honest.” He does get points for not suggesting that AI will fix it, however. Although he did go on to say exactly that in his subsequent interview with CNN.
In 2014, to prevent abusive apps, we announced that we were changing the entire platform to dramatically limit the data apps could access. […] These actions would prevent any app like Kogan's from being able to access so much data today.
This is a little generous. This 2014 change only applied to apps created after that point, and it wasn’t until April 2015 that it actually stopped allowing historic apps to share friends' data without their permission. But what’s a year between friends, hey?
In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against our policies for developers to share data without people's consent, so we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications.
There’s a lot going on here so let’s break it down. Firstly, it appears that Zuck seems to be getting news about his own company from journalists, rather than internal investigations, which is a tad worrying. Secondly, Facebook tries to sound a little tough here by saying it “demanded” that the data was deleted, but all that really seems to mean is that they asked, perhaps a little forcefully, and, surprise surprise, the people who had misused the data said “yep, we’ve got rid of it!”. I can see absolutely no way in which this would go wrong.
Last week, we learned from The Guardian, The New York Times and Channel 4 that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as they had certified. We immediately banned them from using any of our services. Cambridge Analytica claims they have already deleted the data and has agreed to a forensic audit by a firm we hired to confirm this.
There’s a lot of subtext here too. When Zuck says Facebook “learned” from The Guardian, New York Times and Channel 4, he neatly glosses over the bit where Facebook’s lawyers tried to block these “false and defamatory” statements from ever being published in the first place.
I want to thank all of you who continue to believe in our mission and work to build this community together.
It’s hard to know who really believes in Facebook’s mission, so presumably this is directed mostly at Facebook staff, and maybe a few investors too. Facebook’s mission (which it just updated in 2017), by the way, is to “bring the world closer together.” It's fair to say that over the last five days, Zuck has done exactly that, but perhaps not in the way he’d like.
I know it takes longer to fix all these issues than we'd like, but I promise you we'll work through this and build a better service over the long term.
And there we have it. Nearly 1,000 words and no use of the word "sorry'.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
