Zuckerberg weighed naming Cambridge Analytica as a concern in 2017, months before data leak was revealed

Key Facts

CNN — Mark Zuckerberg considered disclosing in 2017 that Facebook (FB) was investigating “organizations like Cambridge Analytica” alongside Russian foreign intelligence actors as part of an election security assessment before ultimately removing the reference at his advisers’ suggestion, according to a 2019 deposition conducted by the Securities and Exchange Commission and reviewed by CNN.
The deposition transcript suggests that in 2017, Zuckerberg considered Cambridge Analytica a potential election concern on par with Russian election meddling efforts even though he said he did not know about the data leak first discovered by Facebook staffers in 2015.
But even though Facebook as an organization knew by that point, in 2017, that Cambridge Analytica had obtained Facebook users’ personal information in violation of the platform’s policies, that incident was never raised to Zuckerberg as a piece of potentially relevant context, according to the deposition.
(The UK ICO’s report later found that Cambridge Analytica did appear to take some steps toward deleting the data, but it also expressed doubts about whether those steps were effective enough.) Zuckerberg reaffirmed in his testimony that had Facebook moved more swiftly to implement an existing and separate plan restricting app developers’ access to Facebook information, the data leak could likely have been avoided from the start.