Zuckerberg refuses to resign as more details emerge on Facebook invading your privacy
Mark Zuckerberg has addressed Facebook's privacy scandal in an hour-long press conference, describing the data breach as a "huge mistake".
In a conference call with reporters, the Facebook CEO addressed tough questions and accepted responsibility for the hacks.
"We didn't do enough. We didn't focus enough on preventing abuse ... that goes for fake news, foreign interference in election, hate speech, in addition to developers and data privacy. We didn't take a broad enough view and that was a huge mistake," Zuckerberg said.
He also rejected the notion he would be stepping down from the top job.
"Life is about learning from the mistakes and figuring out what you need to do to move forward.
"The reality of a lot of this is that when you are building something like Facebook that is unprecedented in the world, there are going to be things that you mess up.
"And if we had gotten this right, we would have messed something else up. I don't think anyone is going to be perfect, but I think what people should hold us accountable for is learning from the mistakes and continually doing better."
The company has also admitted letting data harvesters use their search feature in similar ways to a reverse phonebook.
Australia's privacy watchdog is investigating Facebook over fears as many as one in 50 local users may have had their personal information accessed by Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook admitted 311,127 Australians are among the 87 million users worldwide whose data was unknowingly and "improperly" shared with the British political consulting agency.
The Privacy Commissioner will consider whether Facebook breached the Privacy Act, which requires organisations meet certain obligations including taking reasonable steps to ensure personal information is held securely.
The company has also admitted letting data-harvesters use their search feature in similar ways to a reverse phonebook by using a phone number or email address.
Facebook announced yesterday that "we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped".
"I certainly think that it is reasonable to expect that if you had that setting turned on, that at some point during the last several years, someone has probably accessed your public information in this way," Zuckerberg said.
Facebook said the 'scraping' had been discovered in the past few weeks, but didn't disclose it until it had been confirmed and the company had a chance to gather all the details.
In the Q&A, Zuckerberg said Facebook will consider taking legal action against Cambridge Analytica.
"We have stood down temporarily to let the [UK government] do their investigation and their audit.
"Once that's done we'll resume ours … and ultimately to make sure 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 get people's information," he said.
Up to 87 million Facebook users affected
Cambridge Analytica developed controversial tools for use in political campaigns and worked on Donald Trump's 2016 run for US president.
Yesterday the number of Facebook users affected by the privacy scandal grew from a previous estimate of 50 million to 87 million.
"It very well could be less but we wanted to put out the maximum that we felt it could be as soon as we had that analysis," Zuckerberg said.
"We never put out the 50 million number, that was other parties."
Zuckerberg was unable to give reporters a definitive deadline of when the breach would be fixed.
"This is going to be a never-ending battle. You never fully solve security. It's an arms race," he said.
"I think this is a multi-year effort. My hope is that by the end of this year we'll have turned the corner on a lot of these issues and that people will see that things are getting a lot better."
Read the full transcript from the press conference here.
