Facebook Will Notify 87 Million Users Whose Data May Be Compromised In The Cambridge Analytica Fiasco

5Cambridge Analytica accused of using data of millions

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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6What is the app digital life?

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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7How data was being shared

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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887 million users could be compromised

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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970 million user’s data may have been shared with Cambridge Analytica

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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