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Cambridge Analytica gaffe costs Facebook USD 58 billion

Just Earth News | @justearthnews | 24 Mar 2018, 07:31 am Print

Cambridge Analytica gaffe costs Facebook USD 58 billion

Menlo Park: Social networking giant Facebook has endured a tough week, losing USD 58 billion following the company's admission that it failed to properly handle a data breach, allowing Cambridge Analytica to siphon personal data of over 50 million users.

Since the blunder surfaced, angry users have initiated a #deletefacebook campaign on Twitter, sending Facebook's shares nosediving.

Even though the company's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, apologised for the mistake, experts have said that it was too late by then to stem the rot.

"One of the secrets of Facebook's success has been that the more people who use Facebook, the more integral it becomes to its customers. Unfortunately for Facebook, the same dynamic cuts in the opposite direction if it loses a meaningful number of users as a result of this scandal," BBC quoted senior analyst Laith Khalaf as saying.

Passion Capital tech investor Eileen Burbidge was quoted by the outlet as saying, "The fact that it took them five days to come out with a statement, which happened to be a fair, sensible and comprehensive statement, was just far too long. I think they were just really tone deaf for too many days."

Meanwhile, taking up a dare, Tesla co-founder Elon Musk deleted Tesla and SpaceX's Facebook page.

Musk said that the pages 'looked lame anyway'.