Facebook co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg isn’t firing anyone over the company’s Cambridge Analytica scandal which emerged earlier this year, prompting harsh criticism and significant legislative scrutiny whose real consequences are yet to emerge. “I think it’s a big issue, but look, I designed the platform, so if someone’s going to be fired for this, it should be me,” said one of the world’s richest individuals while speaking to journalist Kara Swisher during the latest edition of the Recode Decode podcast.
When asked whether he’s planning on firing himself, the 34-year-old joked he won’t do so during the podcast itself. The interview is far from the first occasion on which Mr. Zuckerberg accepted full responsibility for the privacy debacle that saw a political consulting firm team up with an academic in order to harvest data of tens of millions of unsuspecting people from all over the world using an online personality quiz with a Facebook login. It’s still unclear whether anyone was ever laid off over the ordeal which Facebook discovered in 2015, a year after it first happened. This spring, Mr. Zuckerberg said he doesn’t have knowledge of any employee being fired due to the Cambridge Analytica episode.
The multi-billionaire also used the interview as an opportunity to reiterate Facebook‘s 2015 changes to its terms of service prevent another Cambridge Analytica ordeal from happening again, adding that the company also restricted third-party access to user data, cut ties with data brokers selling additional information to its advertisers, and is currently in the process of auditing all developers and apps that previously had access to any now-restricted information. Stateside legislators are still likely to attempt regulating digital privacy in the near future, though their proposed measures aren’t expected to be nearly as strict as the General Data Protection Regulation which went into effect in the European Union in late May. Besides the CEO, many other top Facebook executives like COO Sheryl Sandberg recently vowed the social media juggernaut will do better to protect the privacy of its users in the future.