Billion-dollar Facebook investor tells Mark Zuckerberg to quit as chairman

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg should quit as chairman of the company, according to an investor with a $1 billion (£712 million) stake in the technology giant.

New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, who oversees the city’s pension fund, told CNBC that there needed to be more independent board oversight at Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Mr Stringer said revelations that the UK-based data analytics firm harvested personal information from more than 50 million Facebook accounts in the build up to the 2016 US elections represented “a risk to our democracy” and highlighted major issues within Facebook.

“I think there needs to be an independent chairman of the board,” Mr Stringer said. “I think we need more independent directors and directors that have experience in terms of data and ethics and all the things that these emerging huge companies need in light of what’s happened.”

Mr Zuckerberg owns a controlling stake in Facebook, meaning he will have the final say in any changes to the board. Comments on Monday regarding the governance of Facebook suggest that he has no intention of stepping down as chairman.

“One of the things that I feel really lucky we have is this company structure, where at the end of the day, it’s a controlled company,” Mr Zuckerberg told Vox.

“We are not at the whims of short-term shareholders. We can really design these products and decisions with what is going to be in the best interest of the community over time.”

A spokesperson for Facebook told The Independent that the company has no comment on Mr Stringer's remarks.

How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you

+ show all How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you

1/9 Lock your profile down If you haven’t done this already, do it now. In Settings, hit the Privacy tab. From here, you can control who gets to see your future posts and friends list. Choose from Public, Friends, Only Me and Custom in the dropdown menu.

2/9 Limit old posts Annoyingly, changing this has no effect on who’s able to see your past Facebook posts. Instead, on the Privacy page, you have to click on Limit Past Posts, then select Limit Old Posts and finally hit Confirm on the pop-up.

3/9 Make yourself harder to find You can stop completely random people from adding you by selecting Friends of Friends from the dropdown menu in the Who can send you friend requests? section of the Privacy page. It’s also worth limiting who can find your Facebook profile with your number and email address. At the bottom of the page is the option to prevent search engines outside of Facebook from linking to your profile.

4/9 Control access to your Timeline You can limit who gets to post things on your Timeline and who gets to see posts on your Timeline too. In Settings, go to Timeline and Tagging and edit the sections you want to lock down.

5/9 Block people When you block someone, they won’t be able to see things you post on your Timeline, tag you, invite you to events or groups, start conversations with you or add you as a friend. To do it, go to Settings and Blocking. Annoyingly, you have to block people on Messenger separately. You can also add friends to your Restricted list here, which means they’ll still be friends with you but will only be able to see your public posts and things you share on a mutual friend's Timeline.

6/9 Review tags One of Facebook’s handiest privacy features is the ability to review posts you’re tagged in before they appear on your Timeline. They’ll still be visible on the News Feed while they’re fresh, but won’t be tied to your profile forever. In Timeline and Tagging, enable Timeline review controls.

7/9 Clean up your apps You can view a list of all of the apps you’ve connected to your Facebook account by going to Settings and Apps. The list might be longer than you expected it to be. It’s worth tidying this up to ensure things you no longer use lose access to your personal information. If you don’t want to log into websites and apps with your facebook account, scroll down and turn Platform off.

8/9 Change your ad preferences You can view a list of everything Facebook thinks you’re into and tinker with your ad preferences by going to Settings and Adverts. A lot more information is displayed on the desktop site than the app, so we’d recommend doing this on a computer.

9/9 Download your data Facebook lets you download all of the data it has on you, including the posts you’ve shared, your messages and photos, ads you’ve clicked on and even the IP addresses that are logged when you log in or out of the site. It’s a hell of a lot of information, which you should download to ensure you never over-share on the social network again.

Speaking on behalf of New York’s pension fund, Mr Stringer called for four changes to Facebook’s board. As well as Mr Zuckerberg stepping down as chairman, Mr Stringer said three new independent directors should be added to the board and a new data privacy oversight committee should be established. Finally, he requested for an executive “clawback” policy to be implemented.

Mr Stringer said that implementing such changes would be a “slow slog” but remains confident that they can be realised.

“We’re going to keep coming back at them year after year, I think giving testimony in Congress and pressure from other public pension funds,” Stringer said.

“We’re not trying to harm Facebook, we’re trying to make it a stronger company.”

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