Facebook did not read the terms and services of the app that improperly shared user data with Cambridge Analytica, the company’s chief technology officer said Thursday.
“We require that people have a terms and conditions and we have an automated check there at the time — this was in 2014, maybe earlier,” Mike Schroepfer told U.K. lawmakers at a parliamentary committee hearing. “We did not read all of the terms and conditions.”
Facebook will label political adverts and provide an archive of such ads prior to 2019 that shows who has financed them to provide more transparency, Schroepfer said. This is similar to a feature the social network plans to roll out in the U.S. this year.
Schroepfer said, addressing Facebook’s data and advertising practices, that: “It’s my understanding that what we do now is completely legal.”
The company has been haunted by criticism of how it handles users’ data in the wake of a scandal that saw millions of people’s data shared without their permission to political data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.
Cambridge Analytica, which Facebook says may have obtained 87 million users’ records, briefly worked for the Donald Trump presidential campaign in 2016. Its former chief executive, Alexander Nix, was caught on camera saying the company had — but the firm has said Nix’s comments were misconstrued.
