Tayo Olanipekun
As the Cambridge Analytical scandal continues to plague Facebook, with President Muhammadu Buhari reportedly one of the victims of data theft before the 2015 elections, founder of the social media giant, Mark Zuckerberg, has said his company has “a responsibility to protect” and will guard users’ data.
In a statement on his personal Facebook page on Wednesday night, the CEO affirmed that “if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” as he spoke for the first time after his company’s audit of an alleged mishandling of data.
The Guardian and Observer of UK had reported how senior directors of Cambridge Analytica gave its staff instructions to handle materials provided by computer hackers in election campaigns in Nigeria and St. Kitts and Nevis.
The newspapers said the research firm had been hired by a Nigerian billionaire to support the reelection of former President Goodluck Jonathan, having been paid about £2m to campaign against his rival, Buhari, who was then in the opposition.
According to the Guardian, member of the campaign team said the material they believed had been hacked included Buhari’s medical records.
It also reported the Israelis brought a laptop from their office in Tel Aviv and handed Cambridge Analytical employees a USB stick containing what they believed were hacked personal emails.
However, Zuckerberg noted, in outlining the measures his organization is taking, that “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.”
He said the doubt made Facebook immediately ban the research firm from using any of the social media giant’s services, even as he said they are now working with regulators “as they investigate what happened.”
He described the “breach of trust” between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook as also “a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it.”
The tech whizz kid admitted it would take “longer to fix all these issues than we’d like,” but assured users that Facebook will “work through this and build a better service over the long term.”