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.”
Mr 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.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/we-made-a-wrong-call-facebook-says-it-should-have-informed-users-10067144