People are moving to delete their Facebook accounts and are sharing the news on Twitter, where the hashtag #DeleteFacebook was trending earlier this week.
The Wrap reports that after The New York Times and The Guardian reported past weekend that the data of 50 million unsuspecting Facebook users had been taken and then used by a data analysis firm linked to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, Cambridge Analytica, to create psychological profiles of them so they could be targeted with political ads.
Because of Facebook's rules at the time, the app was able to pull data from the Facebook friends of those 270,000 people, which is how they got information from 50 million people who never knew about it and didn't give permission.
The researcher, Cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan, gave all that data to Cambridge Analytica in 2014 which, under Facebook's rules, he wasn't supposed to do. Facebook changed the rules in the years since so that friends' data can no longer be scraped that way, and it claims that it removed Kogan's app when it learned in 2015 that it had misused the data. But for many users, the news highlighted the danger of Facebook having the personal information of more than two billion users.
No comments:
Post a Comment