Facebook COO: 'Our Service Depends on Your Data'

Facebook would not likely be free to use if there were no data-targeted ads, the social media site's COO, Sheryl Sandberg, said Friday on NBC News.

"That would be a paid product," Sandberg said.

After Sandberg's comments, part of which aired Thursday, Facebook clarified that it does not have an ad-free option that would require payment, and that Sandberg was speaking hypothetically, NBC News reported.

The site does not sell or give away user information to advertisers, but "our service depends on your data," Sandberg told NBC.

Targeted ads, where businesses want to aim ads at specific users, are allowed, but she said advertisers do not get individual information, Sandberg said in the interview.

Sandberg acknowledged that the site did not appropriately handle the breach that allowed Cambridge Analytica to get information from as many as 87 million Facebook users. She said in the NBC interview that the investigation continues into what went wrong.

"I'm not going to sit here and say that we're not going to find more because we are," Sandberg said in the NBC interview.

While Cambridge Analytica assured Facebook that it deleted the data it had from Facebook users, Sandberg said that Facebook should have "followed up."

In a conference call with reporters Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook will have "turned a corner" on a lot of issues by the end of 2018.

• Facebook Patient Data Harvesting Project Halted
• Facebook Says Up to 2.7 Million EU Users Affected By Leak