Facebook knew . . . your data isn’t safe: app man

The app developer who mined the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users and then sold it to Cambridge Analytica so the firm could try to influence voters insists Facebook was well aware he was violating their rules — and didn’t care.

Alex Kogan told CBS’s “60 Minutes’’ Sunday that when he built his digital a pp, called this is your digital life, on behalf of Cambridge Analytic a, he clearly wrote in the terms of service that the data he collected could be sold or transferred to third parties.

This was against Facebook’s developer agreement, but the social-media giant never called him on it, the 32-year-old developer (inset) said.

“This is the frustrating bit, where Facebook clearly has never cared. I mean, it never enforced this agreement,” he said.

“The belief in Silicon Valley, and certainly our belief at that point, was that the general public must be aware that their data is being sold and shared and used to advertise to them. And nobody cares.”

Kogan added even he hasn’t read Facebook’s developer agreement and only now understands he broke the rules.

“My opinion has really been changed. And it’s been changed in particular because I think that core idea that we had, that everybody knows and nobody cares, was fundamentally flawed,” he said.

Although Kogan may have written that he planned on sharing data collected by his app, he never told users that he was really after access to their friends, nor that he was working for Cambridge Analytica.

He estimates that “tens of thousands” of apps have collected the data of Facebook users and of users’ unwitting Facebook friends through a feature called “Friends Permissions.”

“It seems crazy now, but this was a core feature of the Facebook platform for years,” Kogan said of the privacy feature. “This was not a special permission you had to get. This was just something that was available to anybody who wanted it who was a developer.”

Facebook did eventually change its policy so developers can no longer gather data from users’ friends without their consent.

The company shut down Kogan’s app in 2015, but didn’t notify the tens of millions of users whose data was scraped until this month.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Kogan’s claims.