Transport bosses plan for ‘open data’
Transport for the North is making plans for an ‘open data hub’ so developers can create new digital services to support public transport in the region.
It follows the precedent set by Transport for London, which has made the provision of open data for third party online application developers a central element of its information strategy.
It has claimed this is adding £130m to the capital’s economy. FACEBOOK AND Cambridge Analytica are facing multiple lawsuits over alleged misuse of personal information as the social media giant began notifying millions of users their data may have been harvested without their knowledge.
At least five law firms in the UK and US are investigating claims for compensation after thousands used an app which collected data about users and their Facebook friends.
Facebook began notifying 87m people worldwide, including nearly 1.1m Britons, that their personal information may have been given to Cambridge Analytica (CA), a UK consultancy accused of using personal data to help politicians sway voters with targeted advertising.
CA maintains the total number is closer to 30m, and insists it did not “illegally or inappropriately” collect or share the data. It adds that it licensed data “on individuals in the United States only” and deleted it once Facebook said its terms of use had been broken.
Facebook insists it has not broken any laws, but the tech giant’s founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg admitted last week that the company “didn’t do enough” to prevent firms using his platform “for harm”.
Mr Zuckerberg is due to answer questions from US Congress yesterday and tomorrow over the scandal of how users’ data may have been used by CA to help Donald Trump’s election campaign to win.
Ravi Naik, from ITN Solicitors in London which is pursuing legal action on behalf of clients, said: “Facebook has taken the first step to accountability, which is accepting there is a problem. But they need to explain what they are going to do to compensate people for the breaches and remedy the problem.”
Lawyers from ITN Solicitors, Leigh Day and McCue & Partners in the UK, and RuyakCherian, Fields and Cross & Simon in the US are all pursuing legal action on behalf of clients.
Mr Naik said his firm will be seeking clarification about how Facebook knows which users were affected by the breach.
A number of people have posted screengrabs of messages they had received from the social network, saying either that they were unaffected, or that their information may have been harvested as a result of them or one or more of their friends using the quiz app This Is Your Digital Life, which was used to secretly harvest information.