Skip to main content

Facebook to send Cambridge Analytica data-use notices


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 U.S., though there are over a million each in the Philippines, Indonesia and the U.K.
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.
Reeling from its worst privacy crisis in history—allegations that this Trump-affiliated data mining firm may have used ill-gotten user data to try to influence elections—Facebook is in full damage-control mode. CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that he made a "huge mistake" in failing to take a broad enough view of what Facebook's responsibility is in the world. He's set to testify before Congress next week.

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.
Facebook later limited the data apps can access, but it was too late in this case.
Zuckerberg said Facebook came up with the 87 million figure by calculating the maximum number of friends that users could have had while Kogan's app was collecting data. The company doesn't have logs going back that far, he said, so it can't know exactly how many people may have been affected.
Cambridge Analytica said in a statement Wednesday that it had data for only 30 million Facebook users.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

DONE DEAL!!! Neymar complete heartfelt transfer to PSG

Neymar has become the most expensive player in soccer history after completing his blockbuster transfer to Paris Saint-Germain from Barcelona on Thursday for $262 million. PSG triggered the release clause in the forward’s Barcelona contract, which was more than double the previous transfer record set a year ago when Manchester United paid $116 million for Paul Pogba. PSG said in a statement that the 25-year-old Neymar had signed a five-year contract, until June 2022. PSG said “his arrival into the Paris Saint-Germain family emphasizes more than ever the club’s aims to rise to the top of world football.” Barcelona did all it could to stop Neymar from leaving and had vowed to complain to the UEFA, European soccer’s ruling body, if his seemingly untouchable release clause was triggered. The payment of the clause directly to the club was the second attempt Neymar’s representatives had made on Thursday to break his bond with Barcelona. Earlier in the day, his lawyer, Juan...

AGRICULTURE......Agriculture the prominent mechanism for Africa Development.

 Approximately two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africa’s population is dependent on agriculture and the sector is responsible for generating one-third of the continent’s GDP. With its vast arable land, Africa has the potential to not only feed its citizens but to export food to other regions of the world. It is therefore astonishing that Africa must import food and rely on food aid to feed its people. The majority of poor subsistence farmers lack the income to buy seeds, fertilizers and tools and the resources to set up even the simplest irrigation system.  Development assistance for agriculture could help provide the resources and the technical expertise to move smallholder farmers out of poverty, but development assistance for agriculture has declined dramatically in the last two-decades. Land-use policies and climate change have exacerbated the dire situation, as have the recent global food and financial crises. ONE urges development partners to implement the fol...

New study: Depression in men can lead to reduced rate of pregnancy in women.

A recent study, published on Thursday in “Fertility and Sterility”, suggests that there is a connection between the fertility level and mental health of men and women both. The research has the data from 1.608 men and 1,650 women, who were selected from six sites in the US, via the NIH’s (National Institutes of Health) Reproductive Medicine Network. A lot of participants are the couples in real life, and were undergoing the fertility treatment, like artificial insemination or medication of ovarian stimulation, but not IVF. Depending on the data, around 2% of men and 6% of women from total participants were reported with major depression events. However, the cases of major depression are small in number, just 34 men; an analysis is done to found the difference in 34 men and the other male participants of the study. The men with major depression have 60% fewer chances to have a live birth compared to the other men (participants) of the study. To put it specifically, among the 3...