Facebook KNEW giving away data on all your friends was wrong
FACEBOOK was always aware that handing over you and your friends' data to other apps was shady.
That's why it pulled the plug on the feature in 2015.
Before then it was a free-for-all. Apps could scoop up all your friends' status updates, check-ins, location, and interests by simply asking for your permission.
That's how the company at the centre of Facebook's latest privacy scandal, Cambridge Analytica, made away with the data of 50 million people.
That info was initially gathered by a rogue app disguised as a personality quiz, which was used by roughly 270,000 Facebook members.
But it also grabbed the data of those members' friends - totalling around 50 million extra users. The app's developer, an academic named Aleksandr Kogan, then reportedly flogged all this valuable info to Cambridge Analytica, which allegedly used it to influence the Brexit campaign and the 2016 US general election.
Facebook Data Breach – what happened?
Here's what you need to know...
- A personality quiz app obtained data for 270,000 willing Facebook users
- But it also sucked up info on all of their Facebook friends
- That meant the app caught data for around 50-60 million users
- This data was reportedly sold on to UK research firm Cambridge Analytica
- Cambridge Analytica helps politicians and lobby groups create propaganda
- The data was supposedly used to boost the Brexit campaign and get Trump into the White House
- Facebook is said to have known about the data breach since 2015
- The social network asked companies with the data to delete it, but didn’t enforce the rule
- The Guardian revealed the incident in an exposé thanks to Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie
- There are now serious questions about whether Facebook has broken laws by giving up this data
And while Facebook asked for this data to be deleted, it had no way of checking so there was nothing it could do about it.
Then in 2015, the social network scrapped the data-scraping tool (known as the Friends Data API).
It had announced plans to bin it a year earlier, citing privacy concerns, but it turns out Zuckerberg and co. were too late.
It is still not clear how many other companies aside from Cambridge Analytica nabbed similar info from Facebook users - raising the possibility of more scandals in the coming weeks and months.
Days before the changes were implemented, Facebook's Simon Cross passed on a from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at a press event.
Confused by the Facebook breach? Check out our helpful guides...
- Facebook data scandal EXPLAINED
- What is Cambridge Analytica?
- Where is Mark Zuckerberg?
- How to see ALL your Facebook data
- How to delete your Facebook account
- Why it's time to delete Facebook
- How to stop Facebook apps handing over your data
He'd said that “if people don’t feel comfortable using Facebook and specifically logging in Facebook and using Facebook in apps, we don’t have a platform."
Zuck said that when people are confident, “they feel happier and use our stuff more, and that’s what we’re tying to achieve”.
It was a far cry from the shocking outburst made by a 19-year-old Zuckerberg, in which he labelled Facebook's early users "dumb f***s" for trusting him with their data.
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Nowadays, Facebook's relationship with apps is a bit different.
The social network now gathers information from users who directly sign up to a particular app.
But this means the site – and the data analysts and developers who use it – can still hoover up a significant amount of data from your own account.
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