Mark Zuckerberg has finally responded to the furor over Facebook’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In a Facebook post, he said he is working to prevent similar abuses of user privacy. “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post. “I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.”

Though he took responsibility for Cambridge Analytica’s abuse of the platform, he stopped short of making an apology. His remarks were Zuckerberg’s first since reports in The New York Times and The Guardian revealed the extent to which data mining firm Cambridge Analytica misused user data from as many as 50 million Facebook users.

The data was provided by a University of Cambridge psychology professor named Aleksandr Kogan, who passed it along to Cambridge Analytica in violation of Facebook’s terms of service. The move raised fresh concerns about how Facebook data can be used without consent, triggering investigations in the United States and the United Kindgom and causing the company’s stock price to plunge.

Zuckerberg also laid out a three-step plan to rebuilding user trust. In the most significant step, Facebook will remove developer access to your data if you haven’t used it in three months. The company is also performing audits on apps that had access to information similar to the data Kogan had access did in 2014, before Facebook removed developers’ ability to mine information about your friends’ profiles.

“We know that this was a major violation of peoples’ trust.”

In the end, Zuckerberg took responsibility for the misuse of user data. “I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I’m responsible for what happens on our platform,” he wrote. “I’m serious about doing what it takes to protect our community. While this specific issue involving Cambridge Analytica should no longer happen with new apps today, that doesn’t change what happened in the past. We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward.”

Zuckerberg has been under mounting pressure to respond after revelations that a since-deprecated feature of Facebook’s platform product had resulted in tens of millions of user profiles from being harvested and used to target political advertising.

In a shorter post, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg echoed the CEO’s comments. “We know that this was a major violation of peoples’ trust, and I deeply regret that we didn’t do enough to deal with it,” she said. “We have a responsibility to protect your data — and if we can’t, then we don’t deserve to serve you.”

I want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation -- including the steps we've already taken and our next... Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Zuckerberg is scheduled to be interviewed on CNN Wednesday evening at 9P ET.