近日，Facebook遭遇了公司創立以來的最大隱私危機。在沉默了五天之后，CEO馬克·扎克伯格終于公開發聲，并表示Facebook以后將做得更好。

他在上周五的一篇文章中表示：“好消息是，為了防止此類事件再次發生的一些最重要的措施，我們其實幾年前就已經采取了。但是我們也犯了一些錯誤，我們還有很多事情要做，而且我們需要加大力度做好。”

最近幾天，關于一家名叫坎布里奇分析公司（Cambridge Analytica）的英國數據挖掘公司獲取5000萬Facebook用戶數據用于2016年為特朗普大選造勢的報道不斷見諸報端。據稱，2013年，一名研究人員開發了一款性格測試小軟件，從而獲取了Facebook的相關用戶信息，之后他將相關用戶數據違規拷貝給了坎布里奇分析公司。

這款性格測試軟件只有30萬名用戶，但它同時也收集了這些用戶的所有好友的信息。

得知坎布里奇分析公司在未經Facebook用戶允許的前提下違規獲取用戶數據后，大量用戶都對Facebook的隱私保護力度表示聲討。有些用戶表示要刪除他們的Facebook賬戶，這對Facebook的業務或將帶來災難性的后果。與此同時，政府監管部門和立法部門也表示將就此事進行調查，而且未來可能將從法律層面進一步加強隱私監管。

目前，Facebook公司一邊忙著四處救火，一邊盡力避免公司高管陷入此次公關風暴，這種做法也使人們對Facebook的領導層提出質疑，人們紛紛表示Facebook高層在逃避責任。與此同時，Facebook的公關團隊和中層領導則不遺余力地給公司洗地，他們披露了很多技術細節，表示當前的風波與一般的黑客攻擊并不是一回事，并且指出從2014年開始，Facebook已經大大削減了分享給應用制造商的用戶數據量。

為了挽救一落千丈的形象，扎克伯格在上周五發文稱，當前的局勢說明，亞歷山大·科根（就是那個性格測試小軟件的開發者）和坎布里奇分析公司（事發后該公司CEO已被停職）辜負了Facebook的信任。不過他同時也承認，“Facebook辜負了那些向我們分享數據、并希望我們能保護這些數據的用戶的信任”。他還表示：“我們要彌補這個問題。”

扎克伯克計劃對2014年Facebook修改其數據分享政策之前，所有曾大量獲取過Facebook數據的應用軟件進行調查，并對任何有可疑行為的應用軟件進行審計。他承諾道：“我們會將所有不接受徹底審計的開發者從平臺上屏蔽。”同時，Facebook還將屏蔽那些不當使用可能追溯到用戶身份的信息的應用軟件，并通知受影響的用戶。

此外，扎克伯格表示，Facebook將進一步嚴控對開發者的數據分享。如果用戶在三個月內沒有使用某款應用，Facebook將切斷應用開發者對該用戶數據的訪問權限。此外Facebook對應用開發者可獲取的用戶數據量也做了限制，當用戶登錄某款應用時，應用開發者將僅能獲取其用戶名、頭像照片和電郵地址。

Facebook用戶還將在他們的新聞推送中看到一個新工具，它能顯示用戶已使用的應用，并能以“一種簡單的方法”阻止這些應用訪問用戶的個人數據。Facebook已經在個人設置里賦予了用戶控制個人數據分享的一些權限，但很多用戶懶得調整設置，還有不少用戶根本不知道有這個功能。

雖然扎克伯格在文中大談保護用戶數據的重要性，但他并沒有解釋為什么Facebook一開始就明知這一點，卻還要無視潛在風險，給予開發者獲取大量用戶數據的渠道。他只是表示，Facebook的政策本意是想讓Facebook變得“更加社交化”。

“我們將從這件事中吸取教訓，進一步保護平臺安全，未來使我們的社區變得更加安全。”扎克伯格說。

這些表態是否能令用戶和監管機構滿意，還是一個未知數。（財富中文網）

譯者：樸成奎?

After five days of silence during one of Facebook’s biggest privacy crises, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has finally spoken publicly about it by vowing to do better.

“The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago,” he said in a Facebook post on Friday. “But we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.”

In recent days, a series of reports have detailed how Cambridge Analytica, a British data mining firm, gained access to personal data on 50 million Facebook users and relied on it as part of its work for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. A researcher who had access to the data after creating an app for taking personality quizzes in 2013 had handed Cambridge Analytica a copy of that data, in violation of Facebook’s policies.

The app itself had only 300,000 users. But it also collected information about all of its users’ friends.

News about Cambridge Analytica’s access to the information, which Facebook users had never consented to, set off a chorus of criticism about Facebook’s privacy safeguards. Some users have responded by saying they would delete their accounts, a potential business catastrophe for Facebook, while government regulators and lawmakers promised to investigate and possibly toughen privacy laws.

Until now, Facebook has tried to weather the PR storm without putting its top executives in the crossfire, generating questions about their leadership and whether the social network was really taking responsibility. Instead, Facebook’s PR team and lower ranking leaders have led the company’s defense by drawing technical distinctions between what happened and more common breaches by hackers, and by pointing out that Facebook curtailed the amount of user data it shared with app makers in 2014.

In his post on Friday, Zuckerberg tried to get out in front of the growing problem by calling the situation a “breach of trust” between the researcher, Aleksandr Kogan; Cambridge Analytica, which has since suspended its CEO; and Facebook. But he also acknowledged that it was “a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it” while adding, “we need to fix that.”

Zuckerberg’s plan is to investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before Facebook changed its data sharing policies in 2014 and to conduct an audit of any app that shows suspicious activity. “We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit,” he promised, along with banning those that Facebook finds misused personally identifiable information and notifying users who were impacted.

Additionally, Zuckerberg said Facebook would further restrict the data it shares with developers. That includes cutting off developer access to data for users who have not used their apps in three months and limiting the amount of data shared with apps when users sign in to only names, profile photos, and email addresses.

Facebook users can also expect to see a new tool at the top of their News Feeds that show the apps they’ve used and “an easy way” to block those apps from accessing personal data. Facebook already gives users the ability to control some of their data sharing in their privacy settings, but many users don’t bother to adjust the settings or don’t realize they can.

Although Zuckerberg talked a lot about protecting user information, he did not mention why Facebook overlooked the potential problems inherent in giving developers such broad access to user data in the first place. Instead, he said the policy was merely intended made to make Facebook “more social.”

“We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward, Zuckerberg said.

Whether that’s enough for users and regulators is an open question.