SINGAPORE: Social media giant Facebook said on Thursday (Mar 22) it “got it wrong” and it had a “moral obligation” to inform its users earlier about the breach in its policies involving political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
This is according to its vice-president of public policy for Asia-Pacific, Simon Milner, who appeared before the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods.
He was questioned by Home Affairs and Law Minister K Shanmugam for about three hours.
Mr Shanmugam had quizzed Mr Milner about allegations that Facebook data was misused by Cambridge Analytica and whether it was “odd” that users were not informed earlier from the perspective of a "reasonable person".
To that, Mr Milner said “it definitely looks like a decision where we made the wrong call”.
“We should have let people know. Our CEO has owned that decision and said that we got that wrong,” he added, referring to founder Mark Zuckerberg’s post on Facebook overnight. In that post, Zuckerberg admitted that the company “made mistakes” and that “there’s more to do.”
AdvertisementAdvertisementMr Milner also admitted that the social media giant had a “moral obligation” to inform users earlier about the breach that occurred between 2014 and 2015.
“We wouldn’t be admitting that we’ve breached people’s trust if that was not the case,” he said in response to Mr Shanmugam’s question.
However, when asked why Facebook did not do so earlier, Mr Milner said he would prefer not to speculate as he had not been involved in the decision making.
Earlier during the exchange, which at times got heated and was one that the Facebook representative acknowledged as a “tough Q&A”, Mr Shanmugam questioned Mr Milner if his answers to the United Kingdom parliament in February were “full and frank”.
Mr Milner had previously told British Members of Parliament on a select committee inquiry into fake news that Cambridge Analytica did not have Facebook data.
To that, Mr Milner responded repeatedly that he had been “frank and honest” with the UK committee and that his answers then were based on what he “knew to be true at the time”.
However, he later admitted that, in hindsight, he could have “provided a fuller answer”.
“I think I’ve been clear about, with hindsight, I could have said more. But the answer I gave were based on what I knew to be true at the time,” he said.
Mr Shanmugam also described Facebook’s behaviour as being similar to an old approach that utility and transport operators used to take with consumers.
Using the example of how train tickets were purchased in the past, he said: “There used to be standard forms on these tickets which would remove all liabilities on the part of the train operator. They can be negligent and may be left without any recourse.”
That is why the law “intervened to equalise the position a bit more and refuse the company in a dominant position to deny liabilities”, Mr Shanmugam said.
“It seems to me that the approach you take is very much similar to the approach that many of these utilities and other operators used to take with consumers - (one of) individual versus a large corporation which seeks to deny all liability.”
When asked if Facebook has a duty to make sure that its users are notified more clearly and protected vis-a-vis third-party app developers, Mr Milner said that Facebook accepts that it has a “very significant responsibility.”
“We’ve been absolutely clear that this was a significant breach of trust with our users and we are determined to address it.”
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