Author: Stephen Johnson / Source: Big Think
Facebook is in damage control mode following last week’s news that the political data firm Cambridge Analytica harvested user data on a massive scale.
The social media giant was the first to break the news. In a statement released on March 16, Facebook described how a psychologist named Aleksandr Kogan, who had developed a personality quiz app, had obtained data through legitimate means from approximately 270,000 users.
However, Kogan violated Facebook policy when he passed along the data of those users, and “more limited information about friends who had their privacy settings set to allow it,” to Cambridge Analytica.What’s missing from Facebook’s statement is the total number of users whose data was harvested: as many as 50 million, according to data scientist Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower who used to work with Cambridge Analytica.
For violating policy, Facebook removed the personality quiz app from its platform in 2015 and requested that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica produce “certifications” showing that all parties had destroyed the data.
“I already had,” Wylie said. “But literally all I had to do was tick a box and sign it and send it back, and that was it. Facebook made zero effort to get the data back.”
That seems to be the extent of what Facebook did to remedy the situation.
“They waited two years and did absolutely nothing to check that the data…
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