- Facebook users could have to pay to completely opt out of their data being used to target them with advertising, COO Sheryl Sandberg, told NBC News.
- “We don’t have an opt-out at the highest level. That would be a paid product,” Sandberg said.
- The comments come after Facebook admitted that 87 million users were affected by the Cambridge Analytica data breach, more than previously suggested.
Facebook users could have to pay to completely opt out of their data being used to target them with advertising, the company’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told NBC News on Thursday.
NBC asked if Facebook could come up with a tool to let people have a button that allows them to restrict the social network from using their profile data to stop targeted ads. Sandberg said that the company has “different forms of opt out” but not one button for everything.
“We don’t have an opt-out at the highest level. That would be a paid product,” Sandberg told NBC.
The comments come in the wake of the scandal in which 87 million Facebook profiles were scraped with the data being sent to political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for the company’s role in the data scandal and is now set to testify in front of Congress on April 11. Zuckerberg has also been summoned to appear in front of lawmakers in the U.K. and European Union.
The data issue arose from a quiz app that collected data of Facebook users and their friends. This data was then passed on to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook banned the app in 2015, and said it got “assurances” from Cambridge Analytica and the app maker that the data was deleted. However, reports suggested this wasn’t the case.
Facebook has been criticized for not checking the data had been erased, a mistake that Sandberg acknowledged.
“We had legal assurances from them that they deleted. What we didn’t do was the next step of an audit and we are trying to do that now,” Sandberg told NBC.
