Facebook data breach hit 562K Indian users

NEWDELHI/WASHINGTON: User data of more than 560,000 Indians may have been harvested from Facebook Inc. by British researcher Cambridge Analytica, at the centre of a recent storm over data breaches and potential privacy violations on the social media network.

Only 335 users i n India installed the thisisyourdigitallife app developed by academic Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research Ltd that may have been possibly at the centre of the data breaches, according to Facebook. The 335 people make up just 0.1% of the app’s total worldwide installs.

Users agreed to take a personality test and have their data collected by the app, which then went on to also access informa- tion about the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a much larger data pool. “We further understand that 562,120 additional people in India were potentially affected, as friends of people who installed the App. This yields a total of 562,455 potentially affected people in India, which is 0.6% of the global number of potentially affected people,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

This week, Facebook said data on as many as 87 million people, most of them in the US, may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, increasing the figure from a previously estimated 50 million.

“Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do, and we require the same from people who operate apps on Facebook. Cambridge Analytica’s acquisition of Facebook data through the app developed by Dr. Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research Limited (“GSR”) happened without our authorization and was an explicit violation of our Platform policies. At no time did Facebook agree to Cambridge Analytica’s use of any Facebook user data that may have been collected by this app, including with respect to users located in India,” the company spokesperson said n an emailed response.