According tor Facebook Canada, they estimate 622,161 Canadians had their data “improperly shared” with Cambridge Analytica. The U.K.-based firm, which served the Trump presidential campaign and Brexit, used data harvested through an innocous personality quiz app that collected personal information about users and their social network.
It is sobering news, that the personal information and data of more than half a million Canadian Facebook users was harvested by political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica who used this information to profit from targeting voters.
Facebook, has 2.2 billion users and is the primary way for people to share and communicate with their firends and relatives. The Cambridge Analytica quizzes were so insidious that they didn't just scrape the personal infomation of users taking the quiz, they managed to mine the information of those user's contacts. So even users who didn't partake of the quiz were exposed against the terms of service of Facebook.
Facebook data of up to 87 million people in total – 37 million more than previously reported – may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, the Facebook has revealed. Making this a monumental breach of trust from a company that's always pushed the boundaries on its user's data. Facebook recently admitted to collecting its user's telephone call and text data from Android devices where their app is installed. This has been going on for years.
Oh wow my deleted Facebook Zip file contains info on every single phone cellphone call and text I made for about a year- cool totally not creepy.
— Mat Johnson (@mat_johnson) March 23, 2018
How does something like this happen. Any user who installs the Facebook app on their Android phone and gives permission for Facebook to access their contacts or address book, ostensibly to enable messaging in Messenger or Facebook Lite. What isn't transparent is that Facebook was logging everyone's phone records.
“If, at any point, you no longer wish to continuously upload this information, you can easily turn this feature off in your settings,” a statement from Facebook states. “You can also turn off continuous call and text history logging while keeping contact uploading enabled.”
As users, we really need to start reading the fine print of these service agreements. It is certainly true that nothing good is free and if a company is giving you access to their service for free, then you are quite likely the product and your information, and that of all your friends or acquaintances, is the currency.