Alibaba's Jack Ma says Facebook should “fix” its privacy issues

Alibaba founder Jack Ma had some unsolicited advice for Mark Zuckerberg yesterday: Take responsibility and fix Facebook’s privacy issues.

Speaking at the Boao Forum for Asia on the island of Hainan, Ma was asked about the scandal engulfing Facebook.

“The senior management should take responsibility, say, hey, from now we start to work on it,” Ma said, according to Reuters.

“The most important solution is, you respect the data, you respect the security, you respect the privacy.”

Ma finished on an upbeat note: “But I think the problem would be solved, we should not kill the company because of these problems.”

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There’s no word yet on how Zuckerberg responded to Ma’s comments -- but if his reaction to Apple CEO Tim Cook is anything to go by, he likely won’t appreciate the advice.

“We care about the user experience and we’re not going to traffic in your personal life,” Cook said when asked about Facebook’s handling of the scandal, which led Zuckerberg to call the Apple CEO’s criticism “extremely glib.”

Alibaba isn’t a stranger to privacy problems itself.

In January this year, the company’s financial arm -- Ant Financial -- was accused of misleading users into handing over their data without permission.

(Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba.)