Mark Zuckerberg (co-founder and CEO of Facebook) hopes number of people affected will not supass 87 million. That’s the overall calculation they make at Facebook. But given that their audit on Cambridge Analytica system is now stopped while UK Authorities carry out their official investigation, the social network is still unable to give an accurate figure.
” We only just finalized our understanding of the situation in the last I think couple of days on this. And as you said, we didn’t put out the 50 million number.
That came from other parties. We wanted to wait until we had the full understanding. Just to give you the complete picture on this: we don’t have logs going back from when exactly [Aleksandr] Kogan’s app queried for everyone’s friends. What we did was basically constructed the maximum possible number of friends lists that everyone could have had over the time, and assumed that Kogan queried each person at the time when they had the maximum number of connections that would’ve been available to them. That’s where we came up with this 87 million number. We wanted to take a broad view that is a conservative estimate. I am quite confident that given our analysis that it is not more than 87 million. It very well could be less, but we wanted to put out the maximum we felt that it could be as that analysis says”. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg said this during a press conference held today.
Facebook can’t still know how many information Kogan got and actually sold
“I don’t know that what we announced today really is connected to what they just said at all. What we announced with the 87 million is the maximum number of people we could calculate could have been accessed. We don’t actually know how many people’s information Kogan actually got. We don’t know what he sold to Cambridge Analytica, and we don’t know today what they have in their system,” said Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg does not discard taking legal action if needed
And he continued: “What we have said and what they’ve agreed to do, is a full forensic audit of their system, so we can get those answers. But, at the same time the UK government, and the ICO, are doing a government investigation and that takes precedence. So, we’ve stood down temporarily, to let the ICO do their investigation and their audit, and once that’s done, we’ll resume ours, so we can get answers to the questions that you’re asking and ultimately to make sure that none of the data persists or is being used improperly. And at that point if it makes sense, we will take legal action if we need to do that to protect people’s information.”
Image over the hedaline.- Mark Zuckerberg (co-founder and CEO of Facebook). © Facebook
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Read the whole Q&A of this press conference here
To listen the whole phone press conference, click here
