Cambridge Analytica: How to tell if your data was shared

You may have heard about the Facebook data breach by Cambridge Analytica the past couple of weeks. Now Facebook are about tell us Brits if your data has been compromised in the data breach.

This week, more than 1 million British people will receive a detailed message on their news feeds. Within this post it will tell users if they are one of the huge 87 million users that have had their data breached. Therefore, used improperly, Facebook will then go one step further to help their users.

So, what is this help? All of Facebook’s 2.2 Billion users, that’s billion with a B! Will receive a notice from them that’s called ‘Protecting your information’. Within this notice will be a link that sends them to a page which tells users which apps have access to their data. Furthermore this page will tell them what information they have shared with said apps. From here users are able to go through the apps and deny access to their data if they wish. You can even go one step further and block any third parties from accessing this data.

Mark Zuckerberg had admitted that he made a huge mistake in realising how much of an affect Facebook had on the outer world. Not fully acknowledging Facebooks wider responsibilities to it’s audience. Facebook’s responsibility is so huge, that, he’s set to testify in front of Congress next week.

Cambridge Analytica: How?

The number of those affected was originally reported as 50Million, however, that number has said to have risen to 87million people. So, how did they get so much data? A personality quiz app called ‘This Is Your Digital Life’ created by Aleksander Kogan is said to be the culprit behind the breach. Kogan allegedly paid 270,000 people to take the quiz. As a result, all of the data of those that took part was breached. But this isn’t the worse part. Due to Facebook’s loose restrictions, data from the friends of the 270,000 people was too breached. Including data which was set to ‘only me’

As a result of this lapse of judgement, Facebook cracked down and limited the data that apps can access. Yet it seems that the damage has already been done.

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