13 South Africans installed the Facebook app from Cambridge Analytica and exposed 96,121 friends' personal data
Facebook has responded to a letter from South Africa’s newly established Information Regulator, telling it that more local users of the social media platform may have had their data shared with UK data marketing firm Cambridge Analytica than originally disclosed.
It has raised the number of users potentially impacted from 59 777 – a number is disclosed on 8 April – to 96 121 now. However, the number of South African users who directly downloaded the app, which extracted user data, has been revised down from 33 to just 13.
So it is not always about what you do yourself, but also what your friends do and what data you have shared with those friends (well at least on Facebook). And of course it is not just what is in the raw data, it is about the conclusions drawn from lots of data that describe patterns of behaviour.
Facebook has a complex platform built around a model of profiting off its users' data, and has apologised many times before (and not seem to have learnt its lesson). For me personally, the trust is most certainly broken and whatever they now want to start doing, is too late for me to go back to Facebook. I'm glad to see many privacy based donor-funded alternatives doing very well now. It may be a new era of social networking dawning where a single monolithic autocratic network is no longer the norm.
See https://techcentral.co.za/more-south-africans-exposed-in-facebook-data-scandal/80777/
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More South Africans exposed in Facebook data scandal – TechCentral |