• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, April 5, 2018

For an hour yesterday, we listened to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg trying to shore up his company’s reputation. The occasion was a telephone press conference.

He repeated — incessantly — that he and his firm now see that “it’s wrong in retrospect to focus only on development and not on the broader issue.”

He boasted that Facebook had shut down a Russian IRA page. 

He mentioned that Facebook is cracking down on apps to prevent data scraping, on top of a plethora of other measures.  

He expressed sympathy over Monday’s shooting at YouTube.

This all sounded soothing last night. It looks a little different the morning after.

Take Zuckerberg’s comments about “the broader issue.” There’s no escaping the fact that it took the Cambridge Analytica scandal to bring Facebook to the point of being privacy proactive.

The magnitude seems to be growing by the day. The company revealed on Wednesday that data on up to 87 million people was exposed — way above the previous outside guestimates of 50 million. 

You can applaud Facebook for admitting this. But it is transparency after the fact — and hardly in the spirit of GDPR.

Zuckerberg didn't mention email. But this issue concerns email marketers because, for one thing, they are getting tarred with the broad privacy brush, just as Acxiom and other alleged "data brokers" were last week. 

It also appears that the wall is getting higher on Facebook's walled garden. Facebook now demands assurance of prior consent, the GDPR standard, before rolling in data for ad purposes. Fine — most email marketers already use permission-based lists for prospect blasts. But getting prior consent is not required by CAN-SPAM, and that may require a retooling. 

Probably just as well, given that GDPR is taking effect next month. 

Speaking of GDPR, Zuckerberg challenged the accuracy of his quotes on compliance in a Reuters story. But a review of the Reuters report shows that it’s not exactly fake news.

Reuters paraphrased Zuckerberg as saying that Facebook was “working on a version of that law that would work globally, bringing some European privacy guarantees worldwide.”

“We’re still nailing own details on this, but it should directionally be, in spirit, the whole thing,” he said, according to Reuters.

That doesn’t differ materially from what Zuckerberg said last night — he mentioned formats. 

“We need to make sure what will make sense in different markets,” he said. “We will make the same controls everywhere.”

Zuckerberg also assured reporters that Facebook has “implemented for years” most of what is required in GDPR, and “not just in Europe.” Again, that does not square with what we know of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Finally, there was Zuckerberg’s comment on the impact of the scandal to the company: He stated that it had not suffered meaningful harm to revenue or membership. 

Anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise: The ensuing litigation alone should enable his lawyers to put their children through college.

Zuckerberg also said “life is learning from the mistakes and figuring what you need to move forward. There’s going to be things messed up, and if we had gotten this right, we would have messed up something else.” 

Aw, shucks — they’re just a bunch of Silicon Valley savants who couldn’t see beyond their own garage doors. But not all mistakes are of equal weight.

Don’t get us wrong. Zuckerberg was charming and articulate, and not to be underestimated. He admitted that “at end of day, this is my responsibility.”

But that brings us to the big question. Financial Times asked if there has been “discussion of whether you should step down as chairman.”

“Not that I’m aware,” he said.