In light of the response on social media that facebook's apology received as well as feeling inspired after reading George Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ and drawing my own opinions after reading the piece, I wanted to try and improve it.
The brief that I had set myself was to make the copy come across more sincerely while also being easier to understand than the original as Facebook as over 2.2 billion monthly active users.
Below is what I’ve written, I have also included the original copy for reference. As a final check, I ran a Flesch-Kincaid readability test on my version and the original to assess the readability of each text.
My Version
We’re sorry we didn’t protect your privacy
A while back, your data was leaked via an app.
We did not do enough to take better care of your data. We are learning from this mistake, and are taking steps to safeguard your personal information to make sure it never breaches our walls again.
We have started by halting apps that have access to large amounts of data. We are also currently in the process banning those that have too much information.
To make sure you are in total control of your data, we will tell you which apps have access to your information. This is so that you can easily turn them off if you want to.
We promise we will do our best to try and earn your trust again.
Thank you for taking the time to listen to us.
The original copy
We have a responsibility to protect your information.
If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.
You may have heard about a quiz app built by a university researcher that leaked Facebook data of millions of people in 2014. This was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time. We’re now taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
We’ve already stopped apps like this from getting so much information. Now we’re limiting the data apps get when you sign in using Facebook.
We’re also investigating every single app that had access to large amounts of data before we fixed this. We expect there are others. And when we find them, we will ban them and tell everyone affected.
Finally, we’ll remind you which apps you’ve given access to your information – so you can shut off the ones you don’t want anymore.
Thank you for believing in this community. I promise to do better for you.