Facebook Inc said on Wednesday the personal information of up to 87 million users, mostly in the United States, may have been improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, up from a previous news media estimate of more than 50 million.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, said in a conference call with reporters that Facebook had not seen “any meaningful impact” on usage or ad sales since the scandal, although he added, “it’s not good” if people are unhappy with the company.
According to Zuckerberg, he had previously assumed that if Facebook gave people tools, it was largely their responsibility to decide how to use them.
But he added that it was "wrong in retrospect" to have such a limited view.
"Today, given what we know..... I think we understand that we need to take a broader view of our responsibility," he said.
"That we're not just building tools, but that we need to take full responsibility for the outcomes of how people use those tools as well."
He said he had not fired anyone over the scandal and did not plan to. “I’m not looking to throw anyone else under the bus for mistakes that we made here,” he said.
Mr Zuckerberg also announced an internal audit had uncovered a fresh problem. Malicious actors had been abusing a feature that let users search for one another by typing in email addresses or phone numbers into Facebook's search box.
As a result, many people's public profile information had been "scraped" and matched to the contact details, which had been obtained from elsewhere.
Facebook has now blocked the facility.
"It is reasonable to expect that if you had that [default] setting turned on, that in the last several years someone has probably accessed your public information in this way," Mr Zuckerberg added.
Zuckerberg, on the call with reporters, said Facebook should have done more to audit and oversee third-party app developers like the one that Cambridge Analytica hired in 2014.
Facebook data scandal has kicked off investigations by Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office, Australia’s Privacy Commissioner and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and by some 37 U.S. state attorneys general.
Nigeria’s government will investigate allegations of improper involvement by Cambridge Analytica in the country’s 2007 and 2015 elections, a presidency spokesman said on Monday.
