In another blow to Facebook, the company fears that millions of more people might have been affected in the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. Previously, the number of people feared to have been affected was around 50 million users which has now increased to 87 million users. Hence, the company has decided to restrict the user data outsiders can access. Telenews previously reported about 50 million users being affected, the numbers have raised now.
Those developments came as congressional officials reported that CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg will testify next week, while Facebook came up with a new privacy policy that aims to explain the data it gathers on users more clearly than ever before. But it doesn’t actually change the information that it collects and shares. Although, during a press conference, Zuckerberg said that they should have done more and will be doing in future but this was quite disappointing for the users and created a negative impact among them. He further revealed how they had assumed that if Facebook gave people tools, it was largely their responsibility to decide how to use them. He further added that it was “wrong in retrospect” to have had such a limited view of the scenario.
The press conference went on for about an hour where Zuckerberg had to answer a lot of questions regarding the scandal, previous privacy policy and the updated one.
Facebook is facing its worst privacy scandal in years following allegations that Cambridge Analytica, a voter profiling company, which worked for the American President Trump’s election campaign, was given access to users’ accounts in order to influence the election result.
On Monday, all Facebook users are going to receive a notice on their Facebook feeds with a link which will enable them to see what apps they use and what kind of access do these apps have about their personal information. They’ll be able to delete apps they no longer want to use. Users who might have had their data shared with Cambridge Analytica will be informed. Facebook says most of the affected users are in the U.S, however, BBC says it has been told that about 1.1 million of the shared data belongs to UK-based account.
Zuckerberg also announced an internal audit had uncovered a relatively new problem. Baleful actors had been using a feature wrongly that let users search for one another by typing the email addresses or phone numbers in the search box.
As a result, user’s public profile information had been dragged and matched to the contact details, which had been obtained from other platforms.. Which is why Facebook has blocked now blocked the facility. The estimated number of people’s data that had been exposed was revealed in a blog by Mike Schroepfer, the tech firm’s chief technology officer.
About 305,000 users had installed the “This Is Your Digital Life” quiz that made all this data-harvesting a reality. Previously suggested figure was 270,000. Most of the users took this quiz by using the Facebook mobile app. About 97% people who installed this quiz were American. However, more than 16 million of the total number of users affected are thought to be from countries other than America.
What is the controversy about?
Facebook has been facing intense criticism the past few days after it came out that Facebook had known how Cambridge Analytica had collected data from millions of its users for years, but had relied on the London-based firm to self-certify that it had deleted the information.
What Cambridge Analytica Has To Say About This:
Cambridge Analytica said it had bought the information from the creator of the “This Is Your Digital Life” app claiming that they were not familiar with the fact how it had been obtained improperly. The firm says it removed all the data as soon as they were made aware of the circumstances.
However, Channel 4 News has reported that at least some of the data is still in circulation despite Cambridge Analytica insisting that it had destroyed all of the information.
During the press conference of Mark Zuckerberg, Cambridge Analytica made a tweet that it had only got 30 million people’s data and not 87 million from the quiz creator, and again stood with their statement that it had deleted all records of all the users it obtained.