Mr. Joel Kaplan:

I thank the Chair and member of the committee for asking us to be here today to talk about the events that have come to light in recent weeks and the steps that we are taking to address them. Ms Sweeney and I are accompanied by Mr. Gareth Lambe, Vice President and Head of Facebook Ireland, Mr. Richard Allan, Vice President for policy in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, or EMEA, Ms Eva Nagle, regulatory counsel and Ms Claire Rush, content counsel. Ms Sweeney, Mr. Lambe, Ms Nagle and Ms Rush are all based at our international headquarters located in Dublin.

I shall start by echoing what has been said by our chief executive officer, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg. What happened with Cambridge Analytica represents a huge violation of trust, for which we are deeply sorry. We now serve more than 2 billion people around the world who use our services to stay connected with the people who matter most to them. We know we have a responsibility to the Facebook community and that people will only feel comfortable using our service if their data is safe.

As our second largest office globally, Facebook Ireland plays an important part in providing that service, with more than 2,500 people working across multiple teams at our international headquarters located in the docklands of Dublin. As Facebook has grown, people everywhere have gotten a powerful new tool to stay connected to the people they care about, make their voices heard and build communities and businesses. It is now clear that we did not do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. We did not take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a mistake.

I will not repeat the detailed timeline in my written statement but I will highlight some key points. In 2014, we made some big changes to the Facebook platform to restrict the amount of data that developers can access and proactively review the apps on our platform. This means that today a developer cannot do what Dr. Kogan did four years ago. In 2015, when we learned that Dr. Kogan had shared the data we banned his app from our platform and demanded that all improperly acquired data be deleted. Last month, when we learned from the media that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as it had certified, we banned the organisation from using any of our services.

Most of the people impacted by this matter were predominantly in the United States. However, as members will have heard from the Data Protection Commissioner, Ms Dixon, we understand that 15 people in Ireland installed Dr. Kogan's app. Also, up to 44,687 people in Ireland may have been friends with someone who installed the app and, therefore, may have been affected. We are notifying all of those people. We have a responsibility to make sure that what happened with Dr. Kogan and Cambridge Analytica does not happen again. As a result, we are limiting the information that developers can access using Facebook login and we are putting additional safeguards in place to prevent abuse. We are also in the process of investigating every app that had access to a large amount of information before 2014. If we find that someone is improperly using data then we will ban him or her and tell everyone affected. We are making it easier to understand which apps people have allowed to access their data and turning off the access to information on any app that they have not used in 90 days. We have expanded Facebook's bug bounty programme so that people can also report to us if they find misuses of data by app developers. We know that there is a lot of work to be done and that this is just the beginning.

Over the past four weeks we have co-operated with Ms Dixon, as our lead regulator, and her office as they have sought to establish what happened and how Irish and EU users may have been affected by Cambridge Analytica. We have shared detailed information with that office about our past and current practices. We continue to engage with them on same. To be frank, the Data Protection Commissioner has been critical of us in recent weeks. We recognise and understand those criticisms. We could and should have done better when responding to concerns. We are committed to doing better going forward.

On 25 May, the General Data Protection Regulation will take effect. Under the regulation, Ms Dixon and her team will become our lead supervisory authority. Transparency is a fundamental requirement of the GDPR. Our teams have worked hard, for the past 18 months, to make key changes to our products that will give our users greater control over their data and visibility as to how they can exercise that control. We take the GPDR very seriously. It places additional standards on companies, which is a good thing. We need to rebuild trust with our users and compliance with the GDPR is critical to that. We have been working with the Data Protection Commission on our final products. We welcome the time invested by that office in an ongoing engagement with Facebook and the feedback that we have received on our GDPR implementation plan.

Finally, I will comment on the Online Advertising and Social Media (Transparency) Bill 2017. I know that Deputy Lawless met our team when he first proposed his Bill. We very much appreciate that he sought to engage with us on his legislation from the outset. We fully understand and appreciate what his Bill seeks to achieve and we are aligned with its goals. It mirrors, in a large part, what we are trying to achieve with the new advertisement transparency tools that we have announced. We agree that when it comes to advertising on Facebook people should be able to see all of the advertisements that a page is running. Also, when it comes to political advertisements, all advertisers should be verified and any advertisements that they run should be clearly labelled to show who paid for them. We are working hard to build out these transparency tools and roll them out globally. However, it takes time to do so and, most important, it takes time to get right. I am able to report the following to the committee today.

As of 25 April, we will add Ireland to our pilot programme for the first phase of our efforts on transparency, namely, the "view ads" tool. This will enable Irish users to see all the advertisements every advertiser is running on Facebook at the same time. We hope it will bring greater transparency to advertisements running in the context of the forthcoming referendum on the eighth amendment.

As I am sure the members will have comments and questions, I will stop there. I thank the committee for inviting us to be here.