It has indeed been such a crazy year for Facebook especially to its founder Mark Zuckerberg. A few months ago, a lot of issues regarding Facebook’s involvement in the 2016 presidential elections came out.
That is when the company Cambridge Analytica said to have hired a tech expert that made a third-party app that easily got people’s personal information from their Facebook accounts. Hundreds of thousands of accounts were said to have been invaded. This then put Facebook in such a difficult situation and it got so far that Zuckerberg had to appear before the Congress and answer some questions.
He also mentioned how the people must actually expect that their data could have been scraped, confused? Well, continue reading to find out how it all went out.
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Zuckerberg Appears Before The Congress
Last week, Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg went to Washington D.C. for a hearing, not just once but twice that actually lasted about 10 hours overall. He had to answer a couple of questions just like how does he think Facebook could make the public trust them again.
Zuckerberg explained that Facebook was just a project that he and his friends were actually working on in a dorm room. He is one of those people who simply wanted something that would allow people to connect with one another regardless of where they are. He admitted that he indeed made a mistake of not letting Facebook become secure enough and now his company is facing the consequences.
He even apologized for all the flaws and said that they will continue to work on it and will make sure that they don’t make the same mistakes twice. The Facebook founder even said that trusting their social media platform is a risk people needed to take so they will make sure that they would provide the necessary security measure that is needed.
The privacy policies of Facebook is not enough which is why one of the senators during the hearing, Sen. Amy Klobuchar asked if Zuckerberg would support the legislation wherein Facebook would then have to notify their users of a breach within 3 days, and he simply said that it is something that makes sense to him.
In an hour I’m going to testify in front of the Senate about how Facebook needs to take a broader view of our…
Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, April 10, 2018
Another question that kept on being fired on Zuckerberg was if Facebook is becoming too big for his team to handle. With over 2 billion people being on Facebook, he admitted that it is indeed getting difficult, which is one of the reasons why his team is looking into getting help from artificial intelligence to basically monitor every single thing that is happening on their social media platform.
Then again, he mentioned that it will take ears for artificial intelligence to do these things by themselves so for now, he would need to double up his team so that they could have enough power to monitor 2 billion users without sacrificing the security measures. However, these people are simply still not enough to go on patrol on Facebook. There is over 100 billion content that is being shared on Facebook every single day and 20,000 people simply cannot handle all of that, hence artificial intelligence is needed.
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Assuming Your Facebook Profile To Be Scrapped
Facebook is a part of this controversy all because of the British political-data company, Cambridge Analytica. However, according to Zuckerberg, Cambridge Analytica is the one that got caught, but it doesn’t mean that they’re the only ones who have done it. People are now wondering if their Facebook accounts have been scrapped since it is kind of impossible to know just by logging in.
Zuckerberg said that people should assume that their data may have actually been scrapped for a while now. Cambridge Analytica is just one of those who pretends to be a harmless app but then once you connect your Facebook account to it, that’s basically how they get you. According to Facebook’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, there is, unfortunately, no way that anyone would protect themselves from this except deleting your account of course.
Washington Post / Youtube
It is uncertain how exactly could Facebook fix this problem but Zuckerberg assures that he and his team are trying their best to make Facebook safe again and so that people wouldn’t worry about getting their privacy being invaded without them knowing.