Facebook to notify 87 million users who had data harvested by Cambridge Analytica hack
Facebook will today notify 87 million users around the world of whether their personal information was harvested by Cambridge Analytica.
It follows the Cambridge Analytica scandal where the files of millions of people on the social networking site were gathered and used by the UK data collection firm.
From 17.00 BST Monday, all 2.2 billion users on Facebook will receive a message on their news feeds titled “Protecting your Information” that will allow them to view the apps they use and what information is shared with those apps.
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Most users will receive a short message, while users who have had their data harvested will receive a longer message saying:
We understand the importance of keeping your data safe.
We have 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.
You can learn more about what happened and how you can remove other apps and websites anytime if you no longer want them to have access to your Facebook information.
There is more work to do, but we are committed to confronting abuse and to putting you in control of your privacy.
Users will then be given the opportunity to turn off apps individually or shut off third party access to apps entirely.
Just waking up in the UK? From around noon you’ll see one of these two messages when you go on Facebook. If you get the one on the right, it means you were one of the 1m-or-so British-based users apparently scooped up by Cambridge Analytica pic.twitter.com/HdGMOZn3iX— Dave Lee (@DaveLeeBBC) April 9, 2018
Of the 87 million Facebook users thought to have had their data shared, around one million are based in the UK.
The measures have been taken following the leak, which Facebook discovered in late 2015, although the company failed to alert its users to it at the time.
Information was collected through an app called This Is Your Digital Life, which was created in 2014 by Cambridge University academic Aleksandr Kogan, who worked with Cambridge Analytica.
The app paid users a fee to take a personality test and give permission for their data to be collected, although the app also took additional information from friends of people using the app.
The news comes as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepares to testify before a joint hearing of two Senate committees this week.
On Tuesday, he will meet the judiciary and commerce committee, before he meets the energy and commerce committee on Wednesday. Zuckerberg will also testify before a House oversight panel on Wednesday.
In a recent interview with Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie, which aired on Sunday on American broadcaster NBC’s Meet the Press, Wylie revealed that the actual number of people affected by the hack could be more than 87 million.
“I know that Facebook is now starting to take steps to rectify that and start to find out who had access to it and where it could have gone, but ultimately it’s not watertight to say that, you know, we can ensure that all the data is gone forever,” he said.