in an attempt to apologise for the controversy surrounding facebook’s recent privacy breach, mark zuckerberg and his facebook team took out full-page ads in several key U.K. and U.S. newspaper publications to issue an apology. the social media channel’s well-publicized privacy breach began earlier in march 2018 when it was revealed facebook knew about massive data theft and did nothing.

 

 

news outlets include the observer, the sunday times, mail on sunday, sunday mirror, sunday express, sunday telegraph, the new york times, the washington post, and the wall street journal. in the apology zuckerberg wrote:

 

you may have heard about a quiz app built by a university researcher that leaked facebook data of millions of people in 2014. this was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time. we’re now taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.’

 

the ads also touched upon plans to limit apps from obtaining information and investigating into others that had access to large amounts of user data.

 

since that news broke and both news outlets and users demanded a response from zuckerberg, the founder has been on a tour of apologies. on his facebook zuckerberg laid out three steps the social media site would take, including investigating all apps that were able to access user data before 2014, when the company began changing its permissions for developers. facebook said it would put restrictions on the data apps can access, limiting them to a person’s name, photo and email. finally, zuckerberg said facebook will make an easy tool that lets everyone see which apps have access to their data and allow them to revoke access. as a result users have been discovering the exact amount of their data the site has been storing as well as joining an online campaign under the hashtag #deletefacebook.