Facebook under fire for huge privacy breach that allegedly helped Trump

USER DATA MINED TO INFLUENCE US ELECTIONS AND BREXIT?

FACEBOOK IS FACING international investigations into the illicit harvesting of users’ personal data. The information was collected by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that backed President Trump’s 2016 election campaign, and is potentially linked with the Brexit campaign. According to a whistleblower, Cambridge Analytica gathered data from 50 million US users, then developed a software program that profiled these citizens to predict voting patterns and, through micro-targeted ads, influence voting decisions.

The data was obtained via a third-party a pp called‘ this is your digital life’ in 2013, that participants willingly signed up for and thus gave up permissions. But it then pulled the personal data of these users’ Facebook friends without their consent, vastly increasing the data pool from the initial 200,000 users to the aforementioned 50 million. Facebook altered their platform the following year, blocking this kind of loophole, and when it became aware of Cambridge Analytica’s breach in 2015, Facebook apparently ordered it to delete the data. Mark Zuckerberg has since apologised and has promised to investigate all apps that had this kind of access prior to the 2014 overhaul and “fix” users’ privacy concerns, but has deftly ignored the global implications these data breaches have had.