Facebook to Require Authorization For Political Adverts - Facebook Rep. (VIDEO)

Facebook's Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer is testifying before the British House of Commons following the data privacy scandal, surrounding Cambridge Analytica.

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Mike Schroepfer characterized the situation with the Cambridge Analytica as "a breach of trust," offering his apologies to people and saying that Facebook didn't do enough to prevent these tools from potentially being used for harm.

"I want to start by echoing our CEO, Mark Zuckerberg: what happened with Cambridge Analytica represents a breach of trust, and we are deeply sorry. We made mistakes and we are taking steps to make sure it doesn't happen again," Schroepfer wrote.

Schroepfer noted that the personal information of about 87 million users might have been improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential election campaign.

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According to the senior official, measures announced by Facebook in 2014 didn't go too far to protect users' data. The Facebook CTO added that the company was aware of the fact that it had a responsibility to the Facebook users stressing that the customers would not use Facebook services if they were not safe enough.

Schroepfer added that following the scandal with Cambridge Analytica Facebook had already taken some steps to prevent the repetition of such developments in future, for example, it limited the capabilities of potentially harmful applications.

Speaking about the ads policy, Schroepfer noted that Facebook hadn't found any Brexit referendum related ads or pages directly managed by the Cambridge Analytica.

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By May 2019, Facebook will require those, seeking to run political adverts to complete an authorization process. Moreover, such ads will be stored in an archive for 7 years and will include general information about the money spent on them and the demographic information.

Schroepfer noted that Facebook had found "almost nothing" spent by Russia's Internet Research Agency on adverts during the 2016 Brexit referendum, adding that political ads were not an important revenue stream for Facebook so decisions on the issue were not about money.

"Political advertising is a very small, low single-digit percentage of our overall advertising, so the decisions here have nothing to do with money or revenue," Schroepfer said.

According to the official, in his understanding, everything Facebook does now is legal.

At the same time, Schroepfer noted that Facebook did not intend its behavior towards the media to be interpreted as trying to stop the truth about the scandal and apologized to the journalized for the company's "bullying" behavior.

In March, media reports emerged that personal information of about 50 million Facebook users had been harvested by the Cambridge Analytica consultancy firm without their permission through a special app called "thisisyourdigitallife."

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While working for major political campaigns, the firm gathered data to develop a mechanism that would predict and influence the behavior of US voters. Later, Facebook estimated the number of users affected at around 87 million, mostly located in the United States.

Since the news of misused data appeared, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized and promised to patch security vulnerabilities. The company has already tightened access to third-party apps and introduced a feature allowing users to remove such applications in bulk. Earlier in April, Zuckerberg testified before the US Congress over privacy concerns.