Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday that the social media company is committed to the privacy of its users and taking steps to ensure that privacy will be protected in the future.
Zuckerberg's announcement followed criticism his company has garnered after a New York Times report revealed over the weekend that a data analytics firm that worked on Donald Trump's campaign obtained data on more than 50 million Facebook users without their permission during the 2016 presidential election.
"We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you," Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. "I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again."
Zuckerberg said that Facebook has already instituted policies to prevent such breaches of privacy from occurring again, and added that the social media giant is looking at ways to bolster those policies.
"The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago," he wrote. "But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it."
Zuckerberg elaborated on how Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics firm, acquired the information of millions of Facebook users.
The data improperly obtained by Cambridge Analytica has drawn consternation and questioning from elected officials in the U.S. and Europe. On Monday, Sens. John Kennedy (R., La.) and Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) called for Zuckerberg to testify before Congress on the extent of the breach.