Internet software company Mozilla says it’s “pressing pause” on Facebook advertising in the wake of the massive Cambridge Analytica scandal that has plagued the social media giant since last week.
“Facebook knows a great deal about their two billion users — perhaps more intimate information than any other company does. They know everything we click and like on their site, and know who our closest friends and relationships are,” the company wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
Citing recent controversy over reports that data firm Cambridge Analytica inappropriately accessed the personal data of 50 million Facebook users during its work for the Trump campaign, Mozilla stated that it had decided to temporarily sever ties with Facebook and would reconsider its relationship with the company at a later date, once the social media platform had reevaluated how it shared user data with different companies.
“This news caused us to take a closer look at Facebook’s current default privacy settings given that we support the platform with our advertising dollars. While we believe there is still more to learn, we found that its current default settings leave access open to a lot of data — particularly with respect to settings for third party apps,” a spokesperson wrote. “…When Facebook takes stronger action in how it shares customer data, specifically strengthening its default privacy settings for third party apps, we’ll consider returning.”
Mozilla is the first major company to publicly declare that it would pull advertising from the social media site over the Cambridge Analytica controversy, although Facebook has been hit hard in other ways. According to CNBC, since the scandal broke on March 16, Facebook has lost nearly $50 billion in share value, or market capitalization, marking a steady three-day decline in the company’s stock price since Monday.
Facebook has so far pushed back against those labeling the hack a “breach,” claiming that Cambridge Analytica gained permission to access personal data from users themselves and had simply “misused” the data it received from a psychology test app it had built, which it could use to target voters with ads or craft campaign strategies. (It’s unclear exactly how the firm ended up using the data.) On Friday, the social media site suspended Cambridge Analytica from its platform, stating in a blog post that the data firm was “committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people’s information.”
“By passing information on to a third party, including SCL/Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, he violated our platform policies,” wrote Paul Grewal, VP & deputy general counsel. “We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people’s information. We will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens. We will take legal action if necessary to hold them responsible and accountable for any unlawful behavior.”
In an attempt to do damage control this week, traditionally camera-shy Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg began making the rounds, giving interviews to an array of media outlets. Speaking with CNN’s Laurie Seagall on Wednesday night, Zuckerberg even expressed an openness to regulation, although he clarified that it should be the “right” kind.
“I’m actually not sure we shouldn’t be regulated,” he said. “…I think, in general, technology is an increasingly important trend in the world and I actually think the question is more what’s the right regulation rather than ‘yes’ or ‘no’ should it be regulated.”
In an interview with Wired on Wednesday, Zuckerberg admitted that the Cambridge Analytica scandal was “one of the biggest mistakes that [Facebook] made,” adding that the company was prepared to launch “a full investigation” into the matter.
“The first action that we now need to go take is to not just rely on certifications that we’ve gotten from developers, but [we] actually need to go and do a full investigation of every single app that was operating before we had the more restrictive platform policies — that had access to a lot of data — and for any app that has any suspicious activity, we’re going to go in and do a full forensic audit,” he said. “And any developer who won’t sign up for that we’re going to kick off the platform.”