CNN's soft-ball-pitching, always-smiling, but-trying-ever-so-hard-to-seem-serious Laurie Segall sat across from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tonight as he broke his silence aboy just WTF happened with regard to the security of 'our' data, Cambridge Analytics' data-mining, Russia, bad-actors, some more Russia, some more meddling, and, oh yeah, data breaches.

The full interview is below but it was Zuckerberg's response (or lack of it) to one question, that raises more questions than it answers...

Segall asked:

"Facebook has asked us to share our data, to share our lives on its platform and it has wanted us to be transparent, and people don’t feel like they’ve received that same amount of transparency. They’re wondering what’s happening to their data. Can they trust Facebook?”

Zuckerberg replied, in the same manner as his non-apology statement earlier in the day, by waffling endlessly over his prescribed talking points and yet failing entirely to answer Segall's simple question...

“Yeah, so one of the most important things that I think we need to do here is make sure that we tell everyone whose data was affected by one of these rogue apps, right?” he said.

“And we’re going to do that. We’re going to build a tool where anyone can go and see if their data was a part of this.”

“So the 50 million people that were impacted, they will be able to tell if they were impacted by this?” Segall asked.

“Yeah - we’re going to be even conservative on that. We may not have all of the data in our system today. So anyone whose data might have been affected by this, we’re going to make sure that we tell. And going forward, when we identify apps that are similarly doing sketchy things, we’re going to make sure that we tell people then too, right? That’s definitely something that looking back on this, you know, I regret that we didn’t do at the time, and I think we got that wrong, and we’re committed to getting that right going forward.”

CNN's Anderson Cooper describe Zuckerberg as "perhaps the most powerful man in the world," noting that his platform is capable in influencing elections and perhaps even wars... little dramatic Anderson...

Fwd to 1:15 for the question (and non-answer)...



Any wiser? Can we trust Facebook?

Perhaps this clip from 2009, when The BBC asked Mark Zuckerberg if Facebook would ever sell personal user data.

His answer? "No! Of course not."

BBC asked Mark Zuckerberg in 2009 if Facebook would ever sell personal user data. His answer? "No! Of course not."

Actions once again speaking louder than words.

All of which perhaps explains the plunge in the odds of Zuckerberg running for President...