The social network even held onto videos users recorded that they chose to delete – Facebook agreed to delete them after this was made public.
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To do so, Facebook would “hire thousands of more people”, meaning that the changes are likely to be implemented this year, according to Zuckerberg, ahead of the USA mid-term elections in November. “And it’s not enough to have rules requiring they protect the information, it’s not enough to believe them when they tell us they are protecting information”, Mr Zuckerberg said on Thursday.
In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said the company does not listen to voice or video calls.
Facebook won’t find “every single bad use of data, but what we can do is make it a lot harder for folks to do that going forward”, he added. The investigation into Facebook will consider wither the company breached Australia’s Privacy Act 1988.
Facebook is under intense pressure after the data of millions of its users ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
The tool was discovered by TechCrunch, which noticed a discrepancy between emailed receipts of Facebook messages being received (which Facebook can not retract) and the actual contents of Facebook inboxes.
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is due to testify before the US Congress next week, in what is expected to be multiple congressional hearings over the scandal.
The Sony messages included critical remarks about movie stars and others in the entertainment industry.
Sandberg and other Facebook officials knew about the Cambridge Analytica breach two and a half years ago.
Facebook this week also rolled out new updates to how it will safeguard user data and proposed updates on its data policy and terms of service to reflect more transparency about how the company collects and shares information.
Cambridge Analaytica, a data-mining firm that has done work for US President Donald Trump, has been accused of harvesting user profiles to help influence elections.
Facebook is in the midst of a widening privacy scandal after is was revealed this week that the private data of 87 million users may have been improperly shared with political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, nearly 40 million more than first estimated.
Cambridge Analytica has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
It’s safe to assume anything you’ve ever sent or shared via Facebook still lives on its servers. unless you’re Mark Zuckerberg.
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Australia and the U.K. joined the United States and Israel in investigating Facebook’s breach of privacy.
