Full Transcript: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg On Protecting User Data

Facebook has been under fire in recent weeks after it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica gained access to millions of users' data while working for President Trump's 2016 campaign. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify before Congress early next week.

In an interview Thursday, Sheryl Sandberg, the social network's chief operating officer tells NPR's Steve Inskeep about the company's missteps, and what it's doing to correct them, and the information being provided to affected users.

Inskeep: I know your time is short, so I'll dive right in. Thanks for doing this, it's great to meet you in person.

Sandberg: I'm really glad to have you.

I want people to know that you have been credited with being part of the reason that Facebook is so profitable. This is a story that's told about you — that the company was popular before you came, that it became much more profitable afterward. Have the events of the last year or two, though, shown that the business model of this company is part of the problem?

I'm going to take a step back and talk about what the problem is, and then get to the business model, because you're asking a really important question. We know that we did not do enough to protect people's data. I'm really sorry for that, Mark's really sorry for that. And what we're doing now is taking really firm action.

Starting Monday we're going to start rolling out to everyone in the world, right on the top of their news feed, a place where you can see all the apps you've shared your data with and a really easy way to delete them. We're being much more restrictive, in the data apps are going to have access to. And just yesterday we announced further steps shutting down data access points in groups and events and pages, and search. And so we are in a process that is evaluating all the ways data is used.

It's going to be long — it took us a long time to get here, it's going to take a long time to find all of this — but it's also going to be ongoing. Because safety and security is never done, it's an arms race. You build something, someone tries to abuse it, you build something. And so the commitment we have is that we have a new approach to not just protecting sharing, but also on privacy.

Then you asked about the business model. And on the business model we have an ads-based business model, just like TV, just like radio. Our content's available to anyone for free because it's ad-supported. And that we feel really proud of, and we're really — we think it's really important. We're trying to connect the whole world. Two billion people use our service; a lot of them would not be able to if they had to pay for the content itself.

And privacy and ads are not at odds. It's a good opportunity to remind everyone what we say all the time, but we need to keep saying so people understand it — which is that we don't sell data, period, and we don't give any advertisers your personal