Facebook users would have to pay the social network to opt-out of its advertising, the company has said.
Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told NBC that Facebook users could have to pay to completely opt-out of their data being used to target them with advertisements.
Sandberg said the company has “different forms of opt out” but not one option that removes everything.
“We don’t have an opt-out at the highest level. That would be a paid product,” Sandberg told NBC News.
Facebook later confirmed the option to pay for the product and remove all targeted adverts is not available to users, and that Sheryl Sandberg was speaking “in hypothetical terms” during the interview.
However, the comments from the Chief Operating Officer are likely to spark fresh speculation about the future of the social network.
Facebook has found itself in the centre of an ever-growing scandal around the privacy of its users.
The social network has confirmed 87 million users’ personal data was scraped and used by UK-based political data company, Cambridge Analytica.
Of those, Facebook has admitted that up to 2.7 million people in the European Union may have been victims.
The news has wiped-off almost $ 50 billion from Facebook’s market value as investors fear the Cambridge Analytica scandal could permanently damage the social network’s reputation, deter advertisers and invite tougher regulation.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologised for his company’s role in the data scandal.
The 33-year-old multi-billionaire will now testify in front of Congress on April 11th.
Meanwhile, Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer will answer questions from British lawmakers on the social media giant’s recent data scandal on April 26, a parliamentary committee has revealed.
Lawmakers had asked Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg to explain to a parliamentary committee how the data got into Cambridge Analytica’s hands.
Committee chair Damien Collins has said it was “astonishing” that Zuckerberg was not prepared to answer questions himself.
Zuckerberg said Facebook has already taken the most important steps to prevent such a situation from happening again.
He told CNN the site would be reviewing thousands of apps in an “intensive process”.
Facebook will ban developers who do not agree to an audit, and an app’s developer will no longer have access to data from people who have not used that app in three months.
He said he was confident Facebook could “get in front” of the problem.
“This isn’t rocket science. There’s a lot of hard work we have to do to make it harder for nation states like Russia to do election interference,” he said.
