Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a prepared statement Monday ahead of his scheduled testimony before Congress, and it wasn’t long before people began to notice what wasn’t included in an otherwise thorough assessment of the situation: everything that happened between 2008 and 2012.
Again, Zuckerberg’s prepared remarks on data collecting skip the years 2008 – 2012. https://t.co/2zL4zjAJRN pic.twitter.com/E2PgDGt051
— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) April 9, 2018
In a subsection of the prepared statement titled “What Happened,” Zuckerberg details efforts made in 2007 to allow apps to access information from friends of users.
In 2007, we launched the Facebook Platform with the vision that more apps should be social. Your calendar should be able to show your friends’ birthdays, your maps should show where your friends live, and your address book should show their pictures. To do this, we enabled people to log into apps and share who their friends were and some information about them.
The very next line skips to 2013, the creation of a personality quiz app and the subsequent use of personal data collected through that app by Cambridge Analytica. Nothing that happened from 2008 to 2012 is mentioned.
Good thing no major politician or data firm did any mining during those years or this would all seem slightly partisan and incomplete.
— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) April 9, 2018
But last month, former Obama campaign staffer Carol Davidsen gave some insight into what was happening in the interim. Although Cambridge Analytica was not specifically involved, there was a significant degree of data-mining occurring under Facebook’s nose.
An article written in 2012 about a project code named tärgus https://t.co/cuwy4MhkPm
— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018
An example of how we used that data to append to our email lists. pic.twitter.com/VHhSukvXDY
— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018
Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.
— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018
They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.
— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018
In addition to his prepared statement, Zuckerberg is expected to answer questions about Russian meddling in the 2016 election and how to best fight future similar efforts on the part of foreign actors.
