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.
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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.
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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