Facebook to Notify 87M Affected by Data Scandal

Notices will go out to around 70M Americans
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Apr 9, 2018 2:03 AM CDT
Facebook to Notify 87M Affected by Data Scandal
The logo for Facebook appears on screens at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York's Times Square.   (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

Get ready to find out if your Facebook data has been swept up in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Starting Monday, the 87 million users who might have had their data shared with Cambridge Analytica will get a detailed message on their news feeds. Facebook says most of the affected users—more than 70 million—are in the US, though there are over a million each in the Philippines, Indonesia, and the UK, the AP reports. In addition, all 2.2 billion Facebook users will receive a notice titled "Protecting Your Information" with a link to see what apps they use and what information they have shared with those apps. If they want, they can shut off apps individually or turn off third-party access to their apps completely.

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie previously estimated that more than 50 million people were compromised by a personality quiz that collected data from users and their friends. In an interview aired Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press, Wylie said the true number could be even larger than 87 million. That Facebook app, called "This is Your Digital Life," was a personality quiz created in 2014 by an academic researcher named Aleksander Kogan, who paid about 270,000 people to take it. The app vacuumed up not just the data of the people who took it, but also—thanks to Facebook's loose restrictions—data from their friends, too, including details that they hadn't intended to share publicly. (Mark Zuckerberg is due to testify before Congress about the scandal this week.)

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