Facebook: Up to 87M users affected in privacy scandal

Facebook revealed Wednesday that tens of millions more people might have been exposed in the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal than previously thought and said it will restrict the data it allows outsiders to access on its users.

Those developments came as congressional officials said CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify next week, while Facebook unveiled a new privacy policy that aims to explain the data it gathers on users more clearly — but doesn’t actually change what it collects and shares.

Facebook is facing its worst privacy scandal in years following allegations that a Trump-affiliated data mining firm, Cambridge Analytica, used ill-gotten data from millions of users to try to influence elections. The company said Wednesday that as many as 87 million people might have had their data accessed — an increase from the 50 million disclosed in published reports.

This Monday, all Facebook users will receive a notice on their Facebook feeds with a link to see what apps they use and what information they have shared with those apps. They’ll have a chance to delete apps they no longer want. Users who might have had their data shared with Cambridge Analytica will be told of that. Facebook says most of the affected users are in the U.S.

With outsiders’ access to data under scrunity, Facebook outlined several changes to further tighten its policies.

Facebook is restricting access that apps can get about users’ events, as well as information about groups such as member lists and content. In addition, the company is also removing the option to search for users by entering a phone number or an email address. While this was useful to people to find friends who may have a common name, Facebook says malicious actors abused it by collecting people’s profile information through phone or email lists.

This comes on top of changes announced a few weeks ago. For example, Facebook has said it will remove developers’ access to people’s data if the person has not used the app in three months.

Earlier Wednesday, Facebook unveiled a new privacy policy that seeks to clarify its data collection and use.

For instance, Facebook added a section explaining that it collects people’s contact information if they choose to “upload, sync or import” this to the service. This may include users’ address books on their phones, call logs and text histories. The new policy says Facebook may use this data to help “you and others find people you may know.”

The previous policy did not mention call logs or text histories. Several users were surprised to learn recently that Facebook had been collecting information about whom they texted or called and for how long, though not the contents of text messages. It seemed to have been done without explicit consent, though Facebook says it collected such data only from Android users who specifically allowed it to do so — for instance, by agreeing to permissions when installing Facebook.