Facebook is to contact 87 million users. Today, April 9, to clarify if their data were shared with Cambridge Analytica. According to the company, these users will receive a detailed message on their News Feed.
The majority of the users, about 70 million whose data were shared, are in the US. Additionally, over 1 million users in the UK, Indonesia, and the Philippines are the affected users. This includes 310,000 users in Australia as well.
All the Facebook users, 2.2 billion at par, will receive a message titled’ Protecting Your Information with a link that’ll lead them to the third-party apps they use on the platform. They can either disable these apps individually or turn off third-party access.
It was revealed by the Observer that Cambridge Analytica obtained millions of US user profiles to create a software program that can predict and influence voters. The British firm is known to have worked with the Donald Trump election team before.
The breach happened in late 2015, as Facebook discovered. But it failed to inform users. Accordingly, the firm said. The info was collected via an app called thisisyourdigitallife. Collaborating with Cambridge Analytica, the app was developed by Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University academic.
Hundreds of thousands of users were paid to go through a personality test before collecting the data. The friends of the users were also affected. Zuckerberg acknowledged that it was a ‘huge mistake’ from his side to not have a broader view in terms of responsibility.
Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower for Analytica, previously predicted that about 50 million users were affected by the personality test coup. Last Sunday, he said that the estimate could be more than 87 million. Analytica, on the other hand, said last week that it was rather only 30 million of the users that they harvested data out of.
