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Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg, acknowledged on Sunday that the increasingly criticized social media platform, “understands the deep responsibilities we have,” and that it has learned its lesson. Facebook is now working on earning back users’ trust after several controversies over data sharing and privacy protection.
At the DLD conference in Munich, Sandberg stated, “At Facebook, these last few years have been difficult. We need to stop abuse more quickly and we need to do better to protect people’s data. We have acknowledged our mistakes.” In addition to addressing this issue, Sandberg also announced that Facebook is going to work with the German government regarding election security and that the company was going to make a $7.5 million donation for the creation of The Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence.
Sandberg discussed five dimensions that Facebook was working on improving. These dimensions are as follows:
- Safety:
The company has increased the human resource allocated to work on this area by 3 times. “If you want to know what a company cares about, look at where it’s spending its money,” Sandberg stated, “We are spending billions of dollars a year on security.” - Election Interference:
She acknowledged that Facebook had failed to realize the threat associated with this issue, as well as, the mass spread of misinformation. She pointed to the partnership with the German government Facebook is working on to be a positive step in this area. - Fake Accounts:
“We’re blocking more than 1 million fake accounts every day, sometimes just when they are created,” she said. - Data Protection:
Sandberg said, “We did not do a good job managing our platform. People trust us with their data, and we have to protect it.” - Transparency:
“It allows other people to hold us accountable,” she stated.
In addition to all of this, she reminded everyone how Facebook is one of the largest creators of jobs in the world and stated that Facebook is “far from done.”
