Social media giant Facebook announced that it will begin to notify people if their Data was stolen in the recent Cambridge Analytica data breach. If your information was stolen, there will be a notification at the top of your Facebook newsfeed. Users can manually check if they were exposed from the Facebook Help Center. According to USA Today, Cambridge Analytica allegedly mined personal data from about 87 million people. American citizens make up about 70 million of that figure, while the other 17 million users came from the UK, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
Media scrutiny intensifies for Facebook
Facebook came under fire in 2016 when considering its role in the presidential election. At first, the company avoided the situation, but it became apparent that domestic and foreign agents used the platform to skew public opinion. Facebook’s media scrutiny intensified last month when the public learned of Cambridge Analytica. Gathering the personal data of millions of users, the political consulting firm was affiliated with Donald Trump. Facebook’s ad-based business and privacy settings are under high scrutiny.
NBC News states that Cambridge Analytica claims it has data from 30 million users, but Facebook updated the number to roughly 87 million users exposed.
This is an approximate number of people that could’ve been exposed to the data mining of Cambridge Analytica. There is no definite number of users as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims the company doesn’t have logs that date back that far.
If you ever took a “personality quiz” on the platform, it’s possible that you may have been a target for the political research firm.
Aleksander Kogan, a researcher, built an app titled “This is Your Digital Life” to gather information on people. Due to Facebook’s information controls, users that participated in the survey also opened the door for the data of their friends to be mined. Facebook eventually restricted the amount of information the apps had access to, but the damage was already done.
Zuckerberg heads to Capitol Hill
People will learn more about the situation from Zuckerberg’s upcoming testimony in front of the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees and the House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 10 and 11. Zuckerberg is doing this as a measure of damage control, and to prevent any organization from taking more aggressive action toward Facebook.
Racked with the worse case of privacy management thus far, Facebook is doing all it can to reduce the problems. CEO Zuckerburg has admitted to not taking a strong enough stance on Facebook’s influence over people. As people learn about the extent of the data breach, Facebook and other companies in the tech industry will need to brace for impact.
