Pressure mounts on Zuckerberg to come clean on data breach

Bloomberg

Government officials in the US and Europe are demanding answers from Facebook Inc. after reports that Cambridge Analytica, the advertising-data firm that helped Donald Trump win the US presidency, retained information on tens of millions of Facebook users without their consent.
Entreaties for the social-media giant to take responsibility evolved into calls for CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear in front of lawmakers. Facebook has already testified about how its platform was used by Russian propagandists ahead of the 2016 election, but the company never put Zuckerberg himself in the spotlight with government leaders. The pressure may also foreshadow tougher regulation for the social network.
“It’s clear these platforms can’t police themselves,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, said on Twitter. “They say ‘trust us.’ Mark Zuckerberg needs to testify before Senate Judiciary.” Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey also separately launched an investigation.
The company said that a professor used Facebook’s log-in tools to get people to sign up for what he claimed was a personality-analysis app he had designed for academic purposes. To take the quiz, 270,000 people gave the app permission to access data via Facebook on themselves and their friends, exposing a network of 50 million people, according to the New York Times. That kind of access was allowed per Facebook’s rules at the time. Afterward, the professor violated Facebook’s terms when he passed along that data to Cambridge Analytica. Shares in Facebook were down 2.2 percent in New York.
Facebook found out about the breach in 2015, shut down the professor’s access and asked Cambridge Analytica to certify that it had deleted the user data. Yet the social network suspended Cambridge from its system, explaining that it had learned the information wasn’t erased. Cambridge, originally funded by conservative political donor Robert Mercer, denied that it still had access to the user data, and said it was working with Facebook on a solution.
The next few weeks represent a critical time for Facebook to reassure users and regulators about its content standards and platform security, to prevent rules that could impact its main ad business, according to Daniel Ives, an analyst at GBH Insights. Menlo Park, California-based Facebook no longer allows app developers to ask for access to data on users’ friends.

Facebook reviews if employee knew of ‘data firm leak’
Bloomberg

Facebook Inc. is reviewing whether one of its own research employees knew about a leak of user information on 50 million people to Cambridge Analytica, the advertising data firm that helped Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential campaign.
Joseph Chancellor works at Facebook as a social psychology researcher and is under review. Previously, he was co-director of Global Science Research, the company that obtained information on Facebook users and their friends through permissions they gave a personality quiz app.