As many as a million British Facebook users may have had their data harvested because they were connected to U.S. users targeted in data passed to Cambridge Analytica, Schroepfer said.
Advertisement
Facebook’s quarterly profit beat analysts’ estimates, as a 49 per cent jump in quarterly revenue outpaced a 39 per cent rise in expenses from a year earlier.
The scandal has raised questions about whether Facebook, which has an estimated 2 billion monthly users, is trustworthy, CNET reported. Daily users are also up, to 1.45 billion.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to face tough questions over the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
Mike Schroepfer characterized the situation with the Cambridge Analytica as “a breach of trust”, offering his apologies to people and saying that Facebook didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from potentially being used for harm. But then again he took a few punches in a second hearing so perhaps Zuck knows how to play it safe.
Previously, Schroepfer told another lawmaker that Facebook users couldn’t opt out of all political advertising, despite having what the company calls a large amount of control over what ads they see. After all, people post all manner of personally revealing things on far more open platforms like Instagram and Twitter, its no wonder that some may simply shrug off data collection. This may strike critics as manipulation of choice – which it is – but to many Facebook user-consumers, it brings the shopping catalogue to you, rather than you having to fetch or scroll down catalgoues.
Asked whether Facebook had invested much on video content in the first quarter of the year, CFO David Wehner said, “It’s clearly going to be more weighted towards the rest of the year”.
Net income in the first quarter climbed 63 percent to $4.99 billion, or $1.69 a share, topping the $1.35 per share analysts predicted.
He insisted that political advertising represented a very small, low, single-digit percentage of Facebook’s advertising revenue, and said such campaigns would soon be made available for viewing in a searchable archive.
Facebook’s Schroepfer replied: “We did not read all the terms and conditions”.
Cambridge Analytica was hired by Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign team, and MPs have also raised concerns over whether adverts on social media could have influenced the European Union referendum.
She said Facebook had only heard from “a handful of advertisers” who paused their spending in the wake of the scandal, one of whom has since returned. Not only to answer questions about this matter but also regarding the Cambridge Analytica that recently emerged.
Facebook had 185 million daily users in the region as of the end of March, up from 184 million in the prior quarter.
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that, ‘ the Facebook executive replied.
Advertisement
Developers say such measures are unfair and unnecessarily punitive, holding their businesses accountable for Facebook’s own lax policies.
