Mark Zuckerberg refuses to quit Facebook after being asked about data harvesting scandal

The boss said he took full responsibility for the 'mistakes' – and so the only person he could fire is himself

Mark Zuckerberg will not quit Facebook despite growing scandals about its "mistakes" in harvesting data, he has said.

The Facebook boss said that he took full responsibility for the scandal and as a result is not in a position to fire anyone. But he also refused to step down, insisting that he remains the right person to run the company.

His statement came during his most in-depth response yet to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which Facebook has revealed could have seen data on 87 million handed over without their knowledge.

As Facebook continues to deal with the fallout from that scandal and other criticism over its use of data, Mr Zuckerberg took a phone call with journalists in which he admitted that the site "didn't do enough" to keep its users and their data safe.

Asked by a journalist if he still thought he was the best person to lead Facebook forward, Mr Zuckerberg said "yes", adding: "I think life is about learning from your mistakes and working out what you need to do to move forward."

"When you're building something like Facebook that is unprecedented in the world there are going to be things you mess up," he added.

After another reporter asked if the board had discussed whether he should step down as chairman in the wake of the company's recent drop in stock price, he said: "Not that I'm aware of."

The questions came after a billion-dollar Facebook investor said that Mr Zuckerberg should step down and allow someone else to serve as chairman of the company he founded.

"We didn't take a broad enough view of what our responsibility is. That was a huge mistake. It was my mistake," he said at the start of the call.

Mr Zuckerberg said that the 87 million figure, buried near the bottom of a Facebook blog post earlier in the day, was "the maximum number" thought possible, and admitted "we don't actually know" the true total that were affected.

Previous estimates had suggested 50 million users were at risk, but as Mr Zuckerberg spoke, Cambridge Analytica claimed on Twitter that "no more than 30 million" individuals saw their data accessed.

The company also tweeted: "When Facebook contacted us to let us know the data had been improperly obtained, we immediately deleted the raw data from our file server, and began the process of searching for and removing any of its derivatives in our system."

Asked about those tweets and whether he would consider taking legal action against any companies that illicitly accessed user data, Mr Zuckerberg said Facebook would allow the UK's Information Commissioner to investigate first but would "take legal action if we need to do that to protect people's information".

In Wednesday's blog post, which outlined a number of proposed changes to Facebook's terms of service in the wake of the privacy row, the company explained that it had disabled a feature that had previously allowed people to search for users by their mobile number or email address, if they chose to allow it in their settings.

Chief technology officer Mike Shroepfer, who wrote the update, said this was because "malicious actors" had "abused these features to scrape public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses they already have through search and account recovery".

On the call, Mr Zuckerberg was asked about this and said: "I would assume if you had that setting turned on that someone at some point has access to your public information in some way."

Additional reporting by agencies