Aftershocks of the Facebook Data Leak are still troubling founder Mark Zuckerberg, as he is now facing criticism from media as well as from Silicon Valley.
Following the Cambridge Analytica revelations, Apple CEO Tim Cook said during an MSNBC townhall: “The truth is we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer, if our customer was our product. We’ve elected not to do that”, taunting Facebook over its actions.
Facebook will likely need “a few years” to fix the problems uncovered by the revelations on the hijacking of private user data, Chief Executive Officer and founder Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with Vox.
Zuckerberg also defended the company’s business model and shot back at criticism of the social networking giant from Apple CEO Tim Cook last week- “I find that argument – that if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you, to be extremely glib. And not at all aligned with the truth,” he said.
He maintained that one of Facebook’s problems was that it was “idealistic,” focusing on the positive aspects of connecting people and that “we didn’t spend enough time investing in, or thinking through, some of the downside uses of the tools. I think now people are appropriately focused on some of the risks and downsides as well,” he said. “I think we will dig through this hole, but it will take a few years.”
“I wish I could solve all these issues in three months or six months, but I just think the reality is that solving some of these questions is just going to take a longer period of time,” he said. He added: “The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can’t afford to pay. And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model.”
How and when Facebook recovers from one of its biggest shakeups yet, is something we’ll have our eyes on.
