
• A Facebook feature allowed people on the internet to look up Facebook users by their phone number or email address and “scrape” data from their public profile.
• Facebook said that feature was turned off on Wednesday.
• Facebook users should assume their data has been scraped, Mark Zuckerberg said on a conference call with reporters.

Facebook revealed on Thursday that as many 87 million users could have had their Facebook data improperly shared with the British political-data firm Cambridge Analytica.

But even if you’re sure you’re not one of those people because you never shared your data with a sketchy quiz app, there’s probably someone out there who has scraped data from your Facebook profile, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday during a call with reporters.

Basically, the search function of Facebook’s apps was so powerful and widely used that if you were a Facebook user and it was turned on – which it was by default – then you should assume someone out there has access to your information, Zuckerberg said.

“I think the thing people should assume – given this is a feature that’s been available for a while, and a lot of people use it in the right way, but we’ve also seen some scraping – I would assume if you had that setting turned on that someone at some point has accessed your public information in this way,” Zuckerberg said.

Here’s how Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer, explained it in a blog post on Wednesday:

Unfortunately, there’s no way to protect yourself from this kind of data scraping on Facebook besides locking down your profile or deleting it. Facebook describes the data taken by scrapers as “public.”

It’s one of several revealing details to come out of the hourlong conference call with reporters – others include that nobody has lost their job over the Cambridge Analytica scandal and that Zuckerberg considers himself a “power user of the internet.”

You can read the entire transcript of the discussion below or on Facebook’s site:</s>Australia has launched a formal investigation into Facebook after the company revealed information about hundreds of thousands of Australians was potentially exposed to data research firm Cambridge Analytica.

The investigation will examine whether the social media giant breached Australia's privacy laws, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) said Thursday.

"Given the global nature of this matter, the OAIC will confer with regulatory authorities internationally," Angelene Falk, the country's acting information and privacy commissioner, said in a statement.

Related: Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress twice next week

Facebook revealed on Wednesday that data from 87 million of its users "may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica," far higher than the 50 million estimated by initial reports.

A little over 300,000 of those users were from Australia, the company said in a blog post. The vast majority of the affected users were in the United States.

Other countries potentially affected by the data breach are the Philippines, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Canada, India, Brazil and Vietnam.

Cambridge Analytica, which also worked on Donald Trump's presidential campaign, disputed the numbers shared by Facebook, saying in a statement that it "licensed data for no more than 30 million people" from the independent scientist who collected it.

"We did not receive more data than this," the firm said.</s>OTTAWA — Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made a public apology Wednesday for his company’s handling of users’ personal information — including more than 620,000 Canadians — as the social media giant faced a growing international uproar over the questionable use of personal data for political purposes.

The company estimates 622,161 users in Canada had their data improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica through apps used by themselves or their friends.

Overall, Facebook says that 87 million of its users worldwide were affected — significantly more than the 50 million originally believed to be affected — with nearly 82 per cent of them believed to be located in the United States.

The company said those affected will find out Monday if their information was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.

Zuckerberg said the privacy breach showed his company didn’t take seriously its responsibility towards users “and that was a huge mistake.”

“It was my mistake. So now we have to go through every part of our relationship with people and make sure we’re taking a broad enough view of our responsibility,” he said during an afternoon conference call with reporters.

“It’s not enough to just connect people. We have to make sure those connections are positive and that they bring people closer together.”

Canada’s privacy commissioner said he wasn’t surprised at the magnitude of the number of Canadians affected. Speaking in Toronto, Daniel Therrien said the figure will work into his ongoing investigation about the data breach and whether there were any violations of federal privacy laws.

Facebook is facing its worst privacy scandal ever in the wake of allegations that Cambridge Analytica used data collected without users’ authorization to help Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and possibly other elections. Policy makers in Canada and other countries are now wrestling with how to respond to the spread of “fake news” on social media platforms like Facebook, which announced Wednesday it had also shut down accounts and pages linked to a Russian agency accused of online meddling in foreign elections.

Zuckerberg said the company would bring to 20,000 the number of workers dedicated to battling “fake news,” as he apologized for initially dismissing the notion that the misinformation campaign had any impact on election outcomes.

The social media giant plans to restrict data access on its platforms, which includes Instagram, to better protect users’ information. Facebook will disable a feature that let anyone search Facebook for a user with their email or phone number, saying in a post that “malicious actors” had used the tool to scrape personal data of most users on Facebook. And starting Monday, it will show people which apps use their Facebook information.

Zuckerberg is set to testify next week before a U.S. congressional committee, and he said top executives at the company would be dispatched to other countries wanting to hold government hearings on the scandal.

Canada’s acting minister for democratic institutions called Facebook’s admission of the scope of the breach “deeply concerning.”

“While Facebook has begun to take initial steps to address these issues, it is clear that much more needs to be done,” Scott Brison said in a statement.

Brison has said he’d be open to strengthening federal privacy laws, which don’t currently apply to political parties. And Zuckerberg appeared open to further regulation in a sector that has so far shied away from government oversight.

International experts in the national capital Wednesday to talk about the issue of “fake news” said the Liberals needed to enact stronger privacy laws to better regulate how social media giants use Canadians’ personal information.

“Since there are insufficient limits on what you can do with personal data, there is no countervailing force,” said David Carroll, an American academic who is suing Cambridge Analytica in the U.K. to gain access to his data.

“We need to realize that privacy legislation will weaken the behemoths in a healthy way.”

Other options put forward included greater transparency for online advertising that would enable users to easily learn who paid for a Facebook ad, how much they spent, how many people viewed it and why the ad targeted the user. Ben Scott, a former adviser in the State Department, said countries should look for ways to restrict the use of personal data for political targeting to avoid the kind of dirty tricks campaigns Cambridge Analytica is accused of conducting.

Sue Gardner, former executive director of Wikimedia Foundation, said there is general opposition south of the border to government regulations in the sector, with a belief that government involvement would make matters worse. Instead, recommendations in the U.S. centre around self-regulation.

“Those are massively insufficient for the scope of the problem,” she said.

— With files from Andy Blatchford in Ottawa and Dave Paddon in Toronto</s>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Investigators on two congressional panels are looking into whether Russia acquired the data of millions of Facebook users and if companies with ties to then-2016 Republican election candidate Donald Trump’s campaign played any role in providing it, three sources familiar with the inquiries said.

On Tuesday, Facebook said it had deleted 70 Facebook accounts, 138 Facebook pages and 65 Instagram accounts that it said were “controlled” by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian propaganda arm based in St. Petersburg.

Last September, Facebook disclosed that it had suspended about 470 “inauthentic accounts” that it believed were “likely operated out of Russia” and had purchased 3,000 ads which “appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages.”

And on Wednesday, the social media platform said the personal information of up to 87 million users, mostly in the United States, may have been improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, up from a previous news media estimate of more than 50 million. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg will testify on April 10 and 11 to Congress.

In an indictment in February, Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating possible Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, charged IRA and 13 Russians with conspiring to interfere in U.S. politics and elections. Moscow denies tampering in U.S. elections and President Trump denies any coordination between his campaign and Russian officials.

Among the issues investigators on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee are digging into are whether IRA and other Russian organizations used any Facebook data, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Also, whether the use of such data had any impact on the U.S. election, and how much Facebook data may have been acquired by Russian entities, the sources said.

Zuckerberg last month disclosed that in 2013, Cambridge University academic Aleksandr Kogan, who ran a company called Global Science Research (GSR), created a personality quiz app that was installed by about 300,000 Facebook users.

Zuckerberg said that because of the way the Facebook platform worked at the time, this gave Kogan access to data of “tens of millions” of friends of users who took the quiz.

On Wednesday, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer, acknowledged in a public posting that “the Facebook information of up to 87 million people - mostly in the US - may have been improperly shared” with Cambridge Analytica.

Zuckerberg said Facebook learned in 2015 that Kogan shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. The London-based consulting firm received millions of dollars from the Trump campaign and a political action committee supported by financier Robert Mercer, who supported Trump. Zuckerberg said Kogan “misused” Facebook’s data.

Cambridge Analytica said in a statement on Wednesday that it “did not use any” data it acquired from Kogan’s company in work related to the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. The firm added that it took legal action against GSR, and that it “immediately deleted the raw data” from its server when it learned from Facebook that the data had been “improperly obtained.”

Representative Adam Schiff, the House intelligence committee’s top Democrat, sent Kogan a letter requesting correspondence and message traffic on his dealings with Cambridge Analytica and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, any material related to Russia, and that Kogan agree to an interview.

Kogan said in an email to Reuters that he knows nothing about Facebook data being obtained by Russia and had never heard of the Internet Research Agency “until a few weeks ago.”</s>CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress next week as authorities investigate allegations that a political data-mining firm inappropriately accessed data on millions of Facebook users

FILE - In this April 18, 2017, file photo, conference workers speak in front of a demo booth at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference, in San Jose, Calif. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress next week as authorities investigate allegations that the political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica inappropriately accessed data on millions of Facebook users to influence elections. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)

Facebook’s acknowledgement that most of its 2.2 billion members have probably had their personal data scraped by “malicious actors” is the latest example of the social network’s failure to protect its users’ data.

Not to mention its apparent inability to even identify the problem until the company was already embroiled in scandal.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters Wednesday that Facebook is shutting down a feature that let people search for Facebook users by phone number or email address. Although that was useful for people who wanted to find others on Facebook, it turns out that unscrupulous types also figured out years ago that they could use it to identify individuals and collect data off their profiles.

Related: Facebook’s Zuckerberg to testify before House panel on April 11

The scrapers were at it long enough, Zuckerberg said, that “at some point during the last several years, someone has probably accessed your public information in this way.”

The only way to be safe would have been for users to deliberately turn off that search feature several years ago. Facebook had it turned on by default.

“I think Facebook has not been clear enough with how to use its privacy settings,” said Jamie Winterton, director of strategy for Arizona State University’s Global Security Initiative. “That, to me, was the failure.”

The breach was a stunning admission for a company already reeling from allegations that the political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica inappropriately accessed data on as many as 87 million Facebook users to influence elections.

Over the past few weeks, the scandal has mushroomed into investigations across continents, including a probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Zuckerberg himself will be questioned by Congress for the first time on Tuesday.

“The FTC looked the other way for years when consumer groups told them Facebook was violating its 2011 deal to better protect its users. But now the Cambridge Analytica scandal has awoken the FTC from its long digital privacy slumber,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director for the Washington-based privacy non-profit Center for Digital Democracy.

Neither Zuckerberg nor his company has identified those who carried out the data scraping. Outside experts believe they could have been identity thieves, scam artists or shady data brokers assembling marketing profiles.

Zuckerberg said the company detected the problem in a data-privacy audit started after the Cambridge Analytica disclosures, but didn’t say why the company hadn’t noticed it — or fixed it — earlier.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday on when it discovered the data scraping.

In his call with reporters Wednesday, Zuckerberg said the company had tried “rate limiting” the searches. This restricted how many searches someone can conduct at one time from a particular IP address, a numeric designation that identifies a device’s location on the internet. But Zuckerberg said the scrapers circumvented that defence by cycling through multiple IP addresses.

The scraped information was limited to what a user had already chosen to make public — which, depending on a person’s privacy settings, could be a lot — as well as what Facebook requires people to share. That includes full name, profile picture and listings of school or workplace networks.

But hackers and scam artists could then use that information — and combine it with other data in circulation — to pull hoaxes on people, plant malware on their computers or commit other mischief.

Having access to such a massive amount of data could also pose national security risks, Winterton said.

A foreign entity could conceivably use such information to influence elections or stir up discord — exactly what Russia is alleged to have done, using Facebook and other social media, in the 2016 presidential elections.

Privacy advocates have long been critical of Facebook’s penchant for pushing people to share more and more information, often through pro-sharing default options.

Related: How Facebook likes could profile voters for manipulation

While the company offers detailed privacy controls — users can turn off ad targeting, for example, or face recognition, and post updates that no one else sees — many people never change their settings, and often don’t even know how to.

The company has tried to simplify its settings multiple times over the years, most recently this week.

Winterton said that for individual Facebook users, worrying about this data scraping won’t do much good — after all, the data is already out there. But she said it might be a good time to “reflect on what we are sharing and how we are sharing it and whether we need to.”

“Just because someone asks us information, it doesn’t mean we have to give it to them if we are not comfortable,” she said.

She added that while she no longer has a Facebook account, when she did she put her birth year as 1912 and her hometown as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Neither is true.

Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.</s>Facebook estimates 622,161 users in Canada had their data improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica. (Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS)

OTTAWA — Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made a public apology Wednesday for his company’s handling of users’ personal information — including more than 620,000 Canadians — as the social media giant faced a growing international uproar over the questionable use of personal data for political purposes.

The company estimates 622,161 users in Canada had their data improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica through apps used by themselves or their friends.

Overall, Facebook says that 87 million of its users worldwide were affected — significantly more than the 50 million originally believed to be affected — with nearly 82 per cent of them believed to be located in the United States.

The company said those affected will find out Monday if their information was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.

Zuckerberg said the privacy breach showed his company didn’t take seriously its responsibility towards users “and that was a huge mistake.”

“It was my mistake. So now we have to go through every part of our relationship with people and make sure we’re taking a broad enough view of our responsibility,” he said during an afternoon conference call with reporters.

“It’s not enough to just connect people. We have to make sure those connections are positive and that they bring people closer together.”

Canada’s privacy commissioner said he wasn’t surprised at the magnitude of the number of Canadians affected. Speaking in Toronto, Daniel Therrien said the figure will work into his ongoing investigation about the data breach and whether there were any violations of federal privacy laws.

Facebook is facing its worst privacy scandal ever in the wake of allegations that Cambridge Analytica used data collected without users’ authorization to help Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and possibly other elections. Policy makers in Canada and other countries are now wrestling with how to respond to the spread of “fake news” on social media platforms like Facebook, which announced Wednesday it had also shut down accounts and pages linked to a Russian agency accused of online meddling in foreign elections.

Zuckerberg said the company would bring to 20,000 the number of workers dedicated to battling ”fake news,” as he apologized for initially dismissing the notion that the misinformation campaign had any impact on election outcomes.

The social media giant plans to restrict data access on its platforms, which includes Instagram, to better protect users’ information. Facebook will disable a feature that let anyone search Facebook for a user with their email or phone number, saying in a post that “malicious actors” had used the tool to scrape personal data of most users on Facebook. And starting Monday, it will show people which apps use their Facebook information.

Zuckerberg is set to testify next week before a U.S. congressional committee, and he said top executives at the company would be dispatched to other countries wanting to hold government hearings on the scandal.

Canada’s acting minister for democratic institutions called Facebook’s admission of the scope of the breach “deeply concerning.”

“While Facebook has begun to take initial steps to address these issues, it is clear that much more needs to be done,” Scott Brison said in a statement.

Brison has said he’d be open to strengthening federal privacy laws, which don’t currently apply to political parties. And Zuckerberg appeared open to further regulation in a sector that has so far shied away from government oversight.

International experts in the national capital Wednesday to talk about the issue of “fake news” said the Liberals needed to enact stronger privacy laws to better regulate how social media giants use Canadians’ personal information.

“Since there are insufficient limits on what you can do with personal data, there is no countervailing force,” said David Carroll, an American academic who is suing Cambridge Analytica in the U.K. to gain access to his data.

“We need to realize that privacy legislation will weaken the behemoths in a healthy way.”

Other options put forward included greater transparency for online advertising that would enable users to easily learn who paid for a Facebook ad, how much they spent, how many people viewed it and why the ad targeted the user. Ben Scott, a former adviser in the State Department, said countries should look for ways to restrict the use of personal data for political targeting to avoid the kind of dirty tricks campaigns Cambridge Analytica is accused of conducting.

Sue Gardner, former executive director of Wikimedia Foundation, said there is general opposition south of the border to government regulations in the sector, with a belief that government involvement would make matters worse. Instead, recommendations in the U.S. centre around self-regulation.

“Those are massively insufficient for the scope of the problem,” she said.</s>SCHWEICH, Germany (CNN/APTN) – The German Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection said Thursday that new European Union data protection regulations coming into force in May would force internet giants such as Facebook to abide by state rules or pay a fine.

The European Union has already adopted a new basic data protection regulation which is intended to provide users with greater transparency regarding the data used.

Facebook and other tech giants like Google are bracing for tough new data privacy rules that take effect May 25th and will apply to any company that collects data on EU residents, no matter where it is based.

The rules will make it easier for consumers to give and withdraw consent for the use of their data.

Facebook could face a fine of almost $2 billion in the event of a violation.

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 Note: By commenting below you agree to abide by the KOBI5.com commenting guidelines. View the KOBI5.com Comment Board Guidelines »</s>CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress next week as authorities investigate allegations that a political data-mining firm inappropriately accessed data on millions of Facebook users

FILE - In this April 18, 2017, file photo, conference workers speak in front of a demo booth at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference, in San Jose, Calif. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress next week as authorities investigate allegations that the political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica inappropriately accessed data on millions of Facebook users to influence elections. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)

Facebook’s acknowledgement that most of its 2.2 billion members have probably had their personal data scraped by “malicious actors” is the latest example of the social network’s failure to protect its users’ data.

Not to mention its apparent inability to even identify the problem until the company was already embroiled in scandal.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters Wednesday that Facebook is shutting down a feature that let people search for Facebook users by phone number or email address. Although that was useful for people who wanted to find others on Facebook, it turns out that unscrupulous types also figured out years ago that they could use it to identify individuals and collect data off their profiles.

Related: Facebook’s Zuckerberg to testify before House panel on April 11

The scrapers were at it long enough, Zuckerberg said, that “at some point during the last several years, someone has probably accessed your public information in this way.”

The only way to be safe would have been for users to deliberately turn off that search feature several years ago. Facebook had it turned on by default.

“I think Facebook has not been clear enough with how to use its privacy settings,” said Jamie Winterton, director of strategy for Arizona State University’s Global Security Initiative. “That, to me, was the failure.”

The breach was a stunning admission for a company already reeling from allegations that the political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica inappropriately accessed data on as many as 87 million Facebook users to influence elections.

Over the past few weeks, the scandal has mushroomed into investigations across continents, including a probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Zuckerberg himself will be questioned by Congress for the first time on Tuesday.

“The FTC looked the other way for years when consumer groups told them Facebook was violating its 2011 deal to better protect its users. But now the Cambridge Analytica scandal has awoken the FTC from its long digital privacy slumber,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director for the Washington-based privacy non-profit Center for Digital Democracy.

Neither Zuckerberg nor his company has identified those who carried out the data scraping. Outside experts believe they could have been identity thieves, scam artists or shady data brokers assembling marketing profiles.

Zuckerberg said the company detected the problem in a data-privacy audit started after the Cambridge Analytica disclosures, but didn’t say why the company hadn’t noticed it — or fixed it — earlier.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday on when it discovered the data scraping.

In his call with reporters Wednesday, Zuckerberg said the company had tried “rate limiting” the searches. This restricted how many searches someone can conduct at one time from a particular IP address, a numeric designation that identifies a device’s location on the internet. But Zuckerberg said the scrapers circumvented that defence by cycling through multiple IP addresses.

The scraped information was limited to what a user had already chosen to make public — which, depending on a person’s privacy settings, could be a lot — as well as what Facebook requires people to share. That includes full name, profile picture and listings of school or workplace networks.

But hackers and scam artists could then use that information — and combine it with other data in circulation — to pull hoaxes on people, plant malware on their computers or commit other mischief.

Having access to such a massive amount of data could also pose national security risks, Winterton said.

A foreign entity could conceivably use such information to influence elections or stir up discord — exactly what Russia is alleged to have done, using Facebook and other social media, in the 2016 presidential elections.

Privacy advocates have long been critical of Facebook’s penchant for pushing people to share more and more information, often through pro-sharing default options.

Related: How Facebook likes could profile voters for manipulation

While the company offers detailed privacy controls — users can turn off ad targeting, for example, or face recognition, and post updates that no one else sees — many people never change their settings, and often don’t even know how to.

The company has tried to simplify its settings multiple times over the years, most recently this week.

Winterton said that for individual Facebook users, worrying about this data scraping won’t do much good — after all, the data is already out there. But she said it might be a good time to “reflect on what we are sharing and how we are sharing it and whether we need to.”

“Just because someone asks us information, it doesn’t mean we have to give it to them if we are not comfortable,” she said.

She added that while she no longer has a Facebook account, when she did she put her birth year as 1912 and her hometown as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Neither is true.

Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.</s>Facebook’s Zuckerberg announces campaign against misuse of platform

Hours after Facebook reported that a political data-sharing scandal affected almost 40 million more of the social network’s users than previously believed, CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday outlined a multiyear campaign to fight election interference by foreign governments and Internet trolls.

In an hour-long phone call with reporters, Zuckerberg acknowledged that disinformation campaigns during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign caught his company unprepared, a mistake he said he was determined not to repeat.

“I’m confident we’re making progress against these adversaries, but they’re very sophisticated,” Zuckerberg said. “And it would be a mistake to think they’re going to give up or stop doing what they’re doing.”

His comments capped a whirlwind day of news in which Facebook reported that up to 87 million of its users may have had their data improperly accessed by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm connected to President Trump’s election campaign. The previous estimate had been 50 million. Facebook on Wednesday also significantly restricted the user data that apps and their developers can access through the social network.

A day earlier, the Menlo Park company removed 70 Facebook and 65 Instagram accounts, along with 138 Facebook pages, controlled by the Internet Research Agency, an organization tied to the Russian government and accused of running disinformation campaigns to benefit the Kremlin. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 12 agency workers for interfering in the 2016 election.

Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify next week at a joint hearing of the Senate’s Judiciary and Commerce committees and before the House of Representatives’ Energy and Commerce Committee, and his comments may have represented a preview.

He called it “a mistake” when shortly after the election he dismissed the possibility that fake news spread across the network had played a role in the election’s outcome. He acknowledged that the company now faces a crisis in public confidence — severe enough to trigger a “#deletefacebook” movement — and said Facebook could no longer take a hands-off approach to what people do with its worldwide platform.

“It’s such a big service that’s so central to people’s lives,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re not just building tools. We need to take responsibility for the outcome of how people use those tools as well.”

The company’s efforts to confront potential election interference, he said, involved dealing with three distinct problems, each with its own possible solutions.

Some of the people spreading disinformation online, he said, are government-connected actors who must be identified and blocked, even as they create a bewildering number of online accounts for disguise.

“People are setting up these large networks of fake accounts, like the (Internet Research Agency) had done, and what we need to do is track it really carefully so we can remove them entirely,” Zuckerberg said. “We take them down and treat that as a security issue.”

At the same time, others spreading disinformation do it strictly for economic reasons. Rather than pursuing some larger political strategy, they post sensational stories to attract readers and make money on advertising.

“If we can just make it so the economics no longer work for them, they’ll move on to something else,” Zuckerberg said. “I mean, these are literally the same people who were sending you Viagra ads in the ’90s.”

Finally, there are users posting political content that isn’t fraudulent but is skewed, cherry-picking facts to make a point. Partnering with fact-checking organizations and favoring stories from established journalism outlets can help address that issue, Zuckerberg said.

“I do think this is a multiyear effort,” he said. “My hope is that by the end of this year, we’ll have turned the corner on a lot of these issues, and people will see things are getting better. But these are big issues.”

Revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook user data reignited a long-simmering debate in Silicon Valley, Washington and around the world about whether online companies do enough to protect the vast troves of information they collect on their users.

“Facebook now plays a critical role in many social relationships, informing Americans about current events, and pitching everything from products to political candidates,” said Sen. John Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, in a statement. “Our joint hearing will be a public conversation with the CEO of this powerful and influential company about his vision for addressing problems that have generated significant concern about Facebook’s role in our democracy, bad actors using the platform, and user privacy.”

Facebook’s openness to third-party developers helped establish it as a force in social networking and fueled its fast growth over the past decade. But Facebook has reconsidered its policies following revelations that Cambridge Analytica obtained data unscrupulously through an academic who tricked Facebook users into handing over information about themselves and their friends with an online quiz.

Facebook said Wednesday that it was closing down a range of services, known as application programming interfaces or APIs, that developers use, and tightening rules for others.

The company is restricting access to data, requiring advertisers to verify that users have opted in to data sharing and taking other steps to make it harder to obtain users’ data surreptitiously through apps.

Some of the new restrictions will hurt developers who build apps using Facebook’s relationships with billions of users and the information they post.

It’s a sharp reversal. In 2014, Facebook, facing criticism from developers that rapid-fire changes to the rules they had to observe were breaking their apps and forcing them to constantly update their software, promised to wait two years after announcing changes to roll them out. That would afford developers plenty of time to make adjustments.

Wednesday’s announcement was an explicit breach of that promise, with most of the changes effective immediately.

A Facebook spokeswoman declined to offer comment beyond Zuckerberg’s remarks in the phone call.

“Innovation demands iteration; it requires constant change,” wrote Ime Archibong, Facebook’s vice president of partnerships, in a blog post announcing the tightening of rules. “And, while change is never easy, we believe the immediate platform updates we are announcing today will build stronger connections for people, developers and businesses in the future, while maintaining their privacy and security on Facebook.”</s>Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made a public apology Wednesday for his company's handling of users' personal information -- including more than 620,000 Canadians -- as the social media giant faced a growing international uproar over the questionable use of personal data for political purposes.

The company estimates 622,161 users in Canada had their data improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica through apps used by themselves or their friends.

Overall, Facebook says that 87 million of its users worldwide were affected -- significantly more than the 50 million originally believed to be affected -- with nearly 82 per cent of them believed to be located in the United States.

The company said those affected will find out Monday if their information was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.

Zuckerberg said the privacy breach showed his company didn't take seriously its responsibility towards users "and that was a huge mistake."

"It was my mistake. So now we have to go through every part of our relationship with people and make sure we're taking a broad enough view of our responsibility," he said during an afternoon conference call with reporters.

"It's not enough to just connect people. We have to make sure those connections are positive and that they bring people closer together."

Canada's privacy commissioner said he wasn't surprised at the magnitude of the number of Canadians affected. Speaking in Toronto, Daniel Therrien said the figure will work into his ongoing investigation about the data breach and whether there were any violations of federal privacy laws.

Facebook is facing its worst privacy scandal ever in the wake of allegations that Cambridge Analytica used data collected without users' authorization to help Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and possibly other elections. Policy makers in Canada and other countries are now wrestling with how to respond to the spread of "fake news" on social media platforms like Facebook, which announced Wednesday it had also shut down accounts and pages linked to a Russian agency accused of online meddling in foreign elections.

Zuckerberg said the company would bring to 20,000 the number of workers dedicated to battling "fake news," as he apologized for initially dismissing the notion that the misinformation campaign had any impact on election outcomes.

The social media giant plans to restrict data access on its platforms, which includes Instagram, to better protect users' information. Facebook will disable a feature that let anyone search Facebook for a user with their email or phone number, saying in a post that "malicious actors" had used the tool to scrape personal data of most users on Facebook. And starting Monday, it will show people which apps use their Facebook information.

Zuckerberg is set to testify next week before a U.S. congressional committee, and he said top executives at the company would be dispatched to other countries wanting to hold government hearings on the scandal.

Canada's acting minister for democratic institutions called Facebook's admission of the scope of the breach "deeply concerning."

"While Facebook has begun to take initial steps to address these issues, it is clear that much more needs to be done," Scott Brison said in a statement.

Brison has said he'd be open to strengthening federal privacy laws, which don't currently apply to political parties. And Zuckerberg appeared open to further regulation in a sector that has so far shied away from government oversight.

International experts in the national capital Wednesday to talk about the issue of "fake news" said the Liberals needed to enact stronger privacy laws to better regulate how social media giants use Canadians' personal information.

"Since there are insufficient limits on what you can do with personal data, there is no countervailing force," said David Carroll, an American academic who is suing Cambridge Analytica in the U.K. to gain access to his data.

"We need to realize that privacy legislation will weaken the behemoths in a healthy way."

Other options put forward included greater transparency for online advertising that would enable users to easily learn who paid for a Facebook ad, how much they spent, how many people viewed it and why the ad targeted the user. Ben Scott, a former adviser in the State Department, said countries should look for ways to restrict the use of personal data for political targeting to avoid the kind of dirty tricks campaigns Cambridge Analytica is accused of conducting.

Sue Gardner, former executive director of Wikimedia Foundation, said there is general opposition south of the border to government regulations in the sector, with a belief that government involvement would make matters worse. Instead, recommendations in the U.S. centre around self-regulation.

"Those are massively insufficient for the scope of the problem," she said.

-- With files from Andy Blatchford in Ottawa and Dave Paddon in Toronto
Facebook suspends AggregateIQ, a Canadian data firm, over concerns about possible data misuse. AggregateIQ was used by the Vote Leave campaign during the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum.