Data-mining firm victims notified
Facebook message about breach goes into news feeds
Facebook has begun alerting some users that their data was swept up in the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal.
Anthony Bagnetto was one of many people who woke up Tuesday morning to a notification on his Facebook feed informing him that “one of ” his friends used Facebook to log into a now-banned personality quiz app called “This Is Your Digital Life.” The notice says the app misused the information, including public profile, page likes, birthday and current city, by sharing it with the political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica.
“Anybody can be taken by this,” said Bagnetto, 38, a triathlon coach who lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and said he didn’t blame whichever of his friends took the quiz for exposing his data.
“It shouldn’t take the pressure off Facebook because people cannot be expected to be that aware of what they’re signing up for,” Bagnetto said.
As many as 87 million users who might have had their data shared were supposed to get the detailed message on their news feeds starting Monday. Facebook says more than 70 million of the affected users are in the U.S., though there are over a million each in the Philippines, Indonesia and the U.K.
The notifications began appearing hours before Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was scheduled to address the privacy scandal in a congressional hearing Tuesday.
Darrell West said he wasn’t too surprised to receive the notification, since he has about 5,000 Facebook friends and it would have taken just one of them to take the personality quiz.
But it still bothered West, who directs the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm affiliated with Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign, obtained users’ data through an app that was purportedly a research tool.
“It disturbs me that some of my information may have helped Donald Trump become president, even if I was only one of 87 million,” West said. “I do think it mattered, just because it was information that was so detailed. It was providing a gold mine for the candidates who use it. It allowed them to target their advertising very effectively and really hone their message.”