Did Cambridge Analytica get YOUR data? Facebook will tell 87 m affected users

Published On: April 9, 2018 12:19 PM NPT By: Agencies


Today Facebook will tell the 87 million users who may have had their information shared with Cambridge Analytica.

Starting Monday all 2.2 billion Facebook users will receive a notice on their newsfeeds, titled 'Protecting Your Information,' with a link to see what apps they use and what information they have shared with those apps.

If they want, they can shut off apps individually or turn off third-party access to their apps completely.

In addition, the 87 million users who might have had their data shared with Cambridge Analytica will get a more detailed message informing them of this.

Facebook says most of the affected users (more than 70 million) are in the U.S., though there are over a million each in the Philippines, Indonesia and the U.K.

Reeling from its worst privacy crisis in history - allegations that this Trump-affiliated data mining firm may have used ill-gotten user data to try to influence elections - Facebook is in full damage-control mode, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledging he's made a 'huge mistake' in failing to take a broad enough view of what Facebook's responsibility is in the world.

He's set to testify before Congress next week.

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie previously estimated that more than 50 million people were compromised by a personality quiz that collected data from users and their friends.

However in an interview aired Sunday on NBC's 'Meet the Press,' Wylie said the number could actually be larger than 87 million.  

He said: 'I think that it could be higher, absolutely.'

That Facebook app, called 'This is Your Digital Life,' was a personality quiz created in 2014 by an academic researcher named Aleksander Kogan, who paid about 270,000 people to take it.

The app vacuumed up not just the data of the people who took it, but also - thanks to Facebook's loose restrictions - data from their friends, too, including details that they hadn't intended to share publicly.

Facebook later limited the data apps can access, but it was too late in this case.

How does Facebook's new bulk app removal tool work?

Facebook has added a new way to remove third-party apps from your profile in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The tool helps users to delete unwanted apps that may be storing their information.

To access the feature, go to the Apps section in your Facebook settings.

This is found by clicking on the downward-facing arrow in the upper right of the main desktop on a computer, or or on mobile by tapping on the three horizontal lines on the navigation bar and scrolling to the bottom.

From here, you can view all third-party apps with access to information stored on your profile under the 'Logged in with Facebook' section.

Tick the box next to any apps you'd rather delete and then select 'remove'.

Confirm your choice by tapping 'remove' again in the resulting popup box.

Within this box, Facebook gives you the option to also delete all posts, photos and videos on the platform posted for you by that app.

Zuckerberg said Facebook came up with the 87 million figure by calculating the maximum number of friends that users could have had while Kogan's app was collecting data.

The company doesn't have logs going back that far, he said, so it can't know exactly how many people may have been affected.

Cambridge Analytica said in a statement Wednesday that it had data for only 30 million people.

 

 


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