Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, on Wednesday publicly addressed for the first time the misuse of data belonging to 50 million users of the social network and described the steps the company would take to safeguard the information of its more than two billion monthly users.

Although his statement addressing a chorus of criticism fell short of a full-throated apology, Mr. Zuckerberg said that Facebook would contact users whose data had been harvested through a personality quiz app and passed along to the political data firm Cambridge Analytica.

“We have a responsibility to protect your data,” Mr. Zuckerberg said Wednesday in a Facebook post, “and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you.”

Mr. Zuckerberg, 33, was trying to quell the crisis over the disclosure last weekend that Cambridge Analytica had used data that had been improperly obtained from Facebook as the firm worked on behalf of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.nytimes.com