Zuckerberg apologises for 'major breach of trust' with Facebook users

Mark Zuckerberg today apologised for a "major breach of trust" with two billion users of Facebook and vowed to take steps to protect user data, as the social media giant was rocked by a data breach scandal.

In his first public comments on the uproar over harvesting of data of 50 million users by a British firm linked to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, the Facebook CEO admitted of making "mistakes" and said he was "happy" to answer questions about the scandal before US Congress.

"This was a major breach of trust and I'm really sorry that this happened," he told CNN.

"Our responsibility now is to make sure this doesn't happen again," he said.

He said Facebook has already taken important steps to prevent such a situation from happening again.

He said the site would be reviewing thousands of apps in an "intensive process".

The data scandal erupted after a whistleblower revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to Trump's 2016 campaign, accessed personal data from 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge, and might have kept that data even after Facebook told the company to delete it.

Cambridge Analytica (CA) had created psychological profiles on 50 million Facebook users via a personality prediction app, created by a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan.

Earlier, Zuckerberg, 33, through a lengthy Facebook post, addressed the privacy scandal. He wrote that the company made "mistakes" and outlined how it has changed its policies to make sure that user data is protected.

"I started Facebook, and at the end of the day, I'm responsible for what happens on our platform. I'm serious about doing what it takes to protect our community," he said.

Zuckerberg said Facebook has a "responsibility" to protect its users' data and if it fails, "we don't deserve to serve you."
"That's definitely something that, looking back on this, I regret that we didn't do at the time," he told CNN. "I think we got that wrong."
He said the company will "investigate every app that has access to a large amount of information from before we locked down our platform, and if we detect any suspicious activity, we're going to do a full forensic audit."
"This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook," Zuckerberg wrote in the post. "But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it."
He cited an example for this: "It (Facebook) will remove developers' access to one's data if the app hasn't been used by the person in three months."