Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 17 April 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment

Online Advertising and Social Media (Transparency) Bill 2017 and the Influence of Social Media: Discussion

2:00 pm

Mr. Joel Kaplan:

That is exactly right. We are doing that with all of the apps that were in the same position as Kogan's app. We have also taken additional steps in recent weeks to further lock down the access by developers to the platform so we do not recreate this kind of problem in the future.

On the first question about Mr. Zuckerberg's comments and mine in my written statement, we do not believe we are a victim here. We believe we have a broader responsibility to the people who use Facebook. We made mistakes, as the Chair and I were just discussing. We want to make right on the mistakes we made with respect to this app but also go further and give the people who use Facebook the confidence that their data is safe. No, we do not believe we are a victim in any way here.

On Andrew Bosworth's memo, Mr. Bosworth has not left the company and has not been fired. His memo did not reflect the company's values, and Mr. Zuckerberg has spoken directly to this. Mr. Zuckerberg did not agree with it then and he has been very clear that he does not agree with it now.

With respect to the online behavioural advertising, or rather the data that is collected when somebody is logged out or is not a Facebook user, the Deputy is exactly right that that is how the modern Internet works - the architecture of the Internet. When someone goes to a website, they will find present on that website code from a number of different sites - it could be Google, Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. When someone is logged out or is not a Facebook user, the data that we get transmitted back to us from that code is quite limited and is mainly IP, the type of browser the person is using and things of that nature. For non-Facebook users we do not use that data for advertising purposes, we do not associate it with an individual, unique user ID and, in most instances, we do not store it more than a few days.