Coinciding with a conference call Wednesday to address the various scandals embroiling Facebook, the embattled company made an astonishing admission: "Most" of its 2.2 billion users have had their data "scraped" by outside groups.
"Until today, people could enter another person's phone number or email address into Facebook search and find them," Facebook's CTO, Mike Schroepfer, wrote. "Malicious actors have ... abused these features to scrape public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses they already have through search and account recovery. Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we've seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped this way."
As of the fourth quarter of 2017, Facebook had 2.2 billion active monthly users, according to Statista.
Schroepfer said based on this realization, the company has disabled this feature. "We're also making changes to account recovery to reduce the risk of scraping as well."
Facebook also admitted that the number of people swept up in the Cambridge Analytica was far more tha originally estimated. Rather than the 50 million Facebook originally stated were compromised, the actual number is at least 87 million.
Mark Zuckerberg said in the conference call with reporters that despite the widening scandal, no one has thus far been fired.
Asked whether he remains the best person to run the company, Zuckerberg responded with a firm, "Yes."
The CEO insisted the #DeleteFacebook campaign popularized after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke hasn't significantly tarnished the social network. "I don't think there's been any meaningful impact that we've observed," he said. "But look, it's not good!”
Zuckerberg described the process of protecting its users data as the start of a massive "three year push."
"I wish I could snap my fingers and in three months or six months have solved these issues," he told reporters. "I do think this is a multi-year effort. ... We're probably a year into massive 3 year push."