Facebook plans to make users who want to keep their personal data away from advertisers — by demanding they pay for the privilege, the company’s second in command, Sheryl Sandberg, revealed on Friday.
“We have different forms of opt-out. We don’t have an opt-out at the highest level,” the Facebook chief operating officer said in an interview on NBC’s “Today.”
“That would be a paid product.”
The NYPost reports the 48-year-old billionaire’s stunning announcement came days after Facebook admitted that the private information of as many as 87 million users was leaked to data firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked on President Trump’s 2016 election campaign.
And don’t expect this to be the company’s last privacy scandal, Sandberg added.
“I’m not going to sit here and say that we’re not going to find more,” she said, “because we are.”
Sandberg admitted Facebook only recently began taking additional steps to secure user data, despite the leak first being discovered in December 2015. The site’s officials, she explained, were led to believe at the time that Cambridge Analytica deleted the harvested data on its own.
Sandberg denied that Facebook is a “surveillance operation” that turns its users into products by selling their data to advertisers.
“We don’t pass any individual information back to the advertiser,” she said.
To which interviewer Savannah Guthrie shot back, “You don’t have to pass it because you collect all the information and then you target the ads for the advertiser.”
“That’s right, and that’s a very good service,” Sandberg replied, stressing that it was for “small businesses.”
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