Facebook has already received significant heat from the controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica and the illicit data gathering. While Mark Zuckerberg’s half-apology was long overdue, it did not do enough to soothe the frayed nerves of users around the world.
Now Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is also on a PR spree for damage control. Sandberg apologized for letting users down on CNBC. She also acknowledged that there will always be bad actors, and that Facebook will take aggressive steps to kick them off the platform.
“We definitely didn’t realize the gravity of this issue sooner, and the commitment we made yesterday is to investigate, to audit and to make it transparent to users, to tell users if their data was used,” she added. Sandberg also stressed that Facebook is open to regulation, pointing that the company already works with lawmakers across the globe.
About the delay in Facebook’s response, Sandberg said,“Sometimes, and I would say certainly this past week, we speak too slowly. If I could live this past week again, I would definitely have had Mark and myself out speaking earlier.” She also pointed that reports about intentionally delaying the disclosure of the huge data leak by the company’s top executives are false.
She reiterated part of Zuckerberg’s response in saying Facebook will now implement stricter data safety and advertisement policies, and even though it will hurt the company’s finances, the firm will proceed with its vision of creating a safe social media platform. Of course, lawmakers around the world are suing Facebook so even though Zuckerberg and Sandberg may have apologized, the worse may not be done yet.
