Facebook is facing a major backlash due to a breach in privacy involving 50 million Facebook users.
Cambridge Analytica, the same company linked to President Donald Trump’s election campaign in 2016 reportedly accessed this data which might have affected the results of the 2016 US presidential elections.
Both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are under international investigation over harvesting users’ personal data over the past few years without the consent and knowledge of the app’s users.
The scandal regarding the breach of data can be traced back to 2013, when data harvesting started with Aleksandr Kogan, a British academic linked to Cambridge. He developed a third party app in the form of a personality quiz which made Facebook users to use their Facebook login credentials to access the app. By taking the personality quiz, the app gathered data about the users and their friends. This information was then passed on by Kogan to Cambridge Analytica.
The activity was a breach in Facebook’s terms and privacy. Cambridge Analytica initially did not know that Kogan got the information illegally and the company claimed to have deleted the data in 2015.
It is still unclear whether the data was indeed used to influence voters in the 2016 elections, however Cambridge Analytica was already working towards developing techniques to do that.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has broken his silence and released a statement regarding the privacy breach.
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104712037900071
While Facebook is doing its investigation, the social network is suspending Cambridge Analytica and all its associates from the platform. Authorities in both the UK and the US have launched investigations regarding how the data was handled.