From Monday 9th April, Facebook is all set to contact its 87million users who could have had their data shared with Cambridge Analytica. It may not be for all, but for those who have been affected, the message by Facebook will show what the media giant plans to do to protect your data.
Along with this move, Facebook will send its entire 2.2 billion users a link that will appear at the top of users news feeds titled “protecting your information”. The link will lead to apps that have been used by users and the information that could have been shared with such apps who could be passing on information to Cambridge Analytica.
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For those who have been affected, Facebook will also send a message visible above the link notifying that their data may have been shared. It was just last week when the social media platform revealed that the data of 87 million users could be compromised because of the scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, the political analysis company. Now FB has announced it will inform all users who have been affected. If you see a link on the top of your news feed saying “protecting your information, click on it and it will take you to a section where you will see apps and websites from which you might have used Facebook to log into. You will get a choice to remove whatever is no longer connected to your account.
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For users who have been directly affected by the biggest scandal of recent months, you may also see the message “we banned the website 'This Is Your Digital Life,' which one of your friends used Facebook to log into. We did this because the website may have misused some of your Facebook information by sharing it with a company called Cambridge Analytica.”
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Follow the image graphic which will reveal how your data is actually shared or collected by social media.
The political firm Cambridge Analytica has been accused of data collection of millions of people without consent. The company had also worked President Donald Trump’s campaign using Facebook ads. It however stated that data was never used for the US election. The company’s CEO Alexander Nix who was ousted was even caught on camera admitting that the firm managed all the digital operations for The Donald Trump campaign.
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Academician at Cambridge University Alexandr Kogan who owns the company Global Science research (GSR) created the quiz app “This Is Your Digital Life" that gave users options to log in through Facebook. Kogan paid about 2780,000 people to take the quiz after which the app gobbled up data of every one of them. However Facebook’s loose restrictions allowed the app to even access data of friends of those who used it. Said Zuckerberg in a post on March 22nd “In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app. It was installed by around 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends' data. Given the way our platform worked at the time this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends' data”.
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If you have realized, whenever you take such quizzes, it gives you a message asking for permission for your Facebook details and account data. It is this data that instead of being kept private was being shared with Cambridge Analytica in 2015. The company in fact, has even admitted this. However CA stated that they had deleted all data from GFR after finding out it had obtained the data through a breach of regulations. Cambridge Analytica denied allegations that it did anything wrong.
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Facebook disclosed last week that the data of 87 million users were compromised because of the data scandal. Many users on the platform could have their profiles scraped which is a process where a website draws out data using a software program.
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Facebook also revealed that there was a possibility that 70 million user’s data may have been shared with Cambridge Analytica who is located in the United States. 1 million may have been affected in the UK, Indonesia and Philippines. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO will be testifying at a hearing before Congress this Wednesday although he has declined to appear before a UK committee.
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Another firm by the name Aggregate IQ also linked to Cambridge Analytica has also been accused of a breach on spending limits during the Brexit referendum that allowed the swaying of votes through nefarious tactics. Facebook has even suspended the company.
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It was just two weeks ago that Zuckerberg admitted the Cambridge Analytica scandal saying "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." Although the data transfer from Facebook to the company was legal, its subsequent transfer of data to Cambridge Analytica was not. That amounted to a breach of privacy.
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Media sources like CNBC have also reported another data analytics firm called CubeYou for using the same tactics as Cambridge Analytica for sharing user’s information through fun quizzes. This misled many people who believed the quizzes were used for academic research of a nonprofit nature. Facebook has also pulled out CubeYou from its platform.
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If users wish, they will be able to shut off all apps and turn off third-party access to their apps completely. In simpler terms, Facebook will reveal to you what apps you might have signed into with Facebook or quizzes and surveys etc where you could then shut them off. Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook came up with the figure of 87 million by calculating the maximum number of friends that users had access to while Kogan’s app collected data. However that’s about it and they cannot find if that number is in excess because the company’s logs don’t go back so far.
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“A lot of you are asking how to control what information you share on Facebook, who has access to it, and how to remove it. We recently put all your privacy and security settings in one place called Privacy Shortcuts to make it easier to use. We're going to put this in front of everyone over the next few weeks. We're also going to put a tool with all the platform apps you've signed into in at the top of your News Feed so you can easily remove any apps you no longer use.”
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