Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg knows what it feels like to have 50 million people shouting at him at one time. Zuckerberg is in the hot seat for the alleged data breach by the U.K. company, Cambridge Analytica. According to Cambridge Analytica, the advertising platform the company set up on Facebook played an instrumental part in the election of Donald Trump. The world now knows Zuckerberg and his team of tech professionals were either asleep when they saw the Cambridge ads, or they thought no one would notice the suggestive political ads that Cambridge put in play on the site. Facebook either didn’t know or overlooked the alleged data duplicating plan. Zuckerberg has a lot of explaining to do to U.S. and U.K. lawmakers, but he recently said he’s not going to talk to the U.K.’s Parliament.
The aftershocks from this earth-shattering social blunder are coming to the surface now that the world knows Facebook has serious internal issues to address. Zuckerberg was ready to preview Facebook’s new Portal Smart Speaker at the May F8 developers conference, but that’s not going to happen. Facebook’s smart speak is a rival of Amazon’s Echo and Google’s HomePod speaker system. According to Bloomberg News, Zuckerberg decided to postpone the preview until after the May conference. The public outrage over the alleged Cambridge data breach isn’t over. Thousands of people around the world are deleting their Facebook profiles because they don’t want to be a data breach statistic in the future.
The Facebook Smart Speaker features a large touchscreen with speakers and a camera. The system is capable of facial recognition and it comes with a smart assistant like Alexa as well as voice calling. According to Facebook, the price is $499.
The last thing Facebook users want at this point in time is another Facebook product that sits in their home and recognizes their face and collects their data at the same time, according to some recent news reports.
The ironic part of the pullback is Zuckerberg lives by the motto of moving fast and break things along the way. It seems that motto may explain why Cambridge Analytica could do what they did, and why Zuckerberg may be rethinking the meaning of his motto.
