It might be a little dramatic to say that Facebook is a bad company that has made the world worse, but then we do live in dramatic times and Facebook has definitely made the world worse—both by making us resent our friends and for inadvertently facilitating the election of Donald Trump in multiple different ways. Recently, Facebook has been caught in another embarrassing fuck-up, with a man revealing that a consulting company he co-founded (Cambridge Analytica) tricked 50 million Facebook users into giving up their personal information to power the Trump campaign’s advertising machine. Facebook politely asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the data once it discovered the breach, and when it didn’t, Facebook banned the company’s founders from the service.
That was a pretty meaningless gesture, especially with Facebook itself staying silent on the whole issue, but now Mark Zuckerberg has come forward to sort of apologize and acknowledge that his company has—once again—made a mistake. As reported by The New York Times, Zuckerberg shared a lengthy Facebook post today in which he said, “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you.” He explained that Facebook will look into apps that use “large amounts of information,” and it will also start being more upfront about which apps have access to which data and how users can revoke that access.
As the New York Times story notes, a lot of disgruntled users have begun deleting their profiles completely, and people from within Facebook have even suggested that their work has become “demoralizing.” Apparently nobody like its very much when your company is partly responsible for letting bad things happen.