Almost all Facebook users must assume that their data has been compromised
Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of Facebook revealed yesterday in a conversation with press and media that all 2.2 billion users of Facebook must assume that their public data has been collected by so-called third-party data scrapers
The source of this vulnerability is the search function of Facebook, that allows everyone to search for users via their email address or phone number. Users must sign up for this, via an option that lets your name appear in the search queries. But the security settings have enabled this option by default.
Blog post
In a blog post from Facebook, CTO Mike Schroepfer lets you know what the impact is of this problem. Because malicious people have also misused these functions to collect public profile information. “ Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we have seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way, ” Schroepfer indicates.
Call
During a call with members of the press, Zuckerberg indicated how open Facebook left its users: “ I would have gone if you had that setting your public information in some way. “
Incidentally, he indicates that it is his mistake. People just make mistakes. And if they had just done this, something else would probably have gone wrong.
Cambridge Analytica
A total of 87 million users may have been the victim of the Cambridge Analytica scandal . And these are not just users in the US. Facebook announced the NOS to among others, . However, both are maximum numbers. They do not know very precisely, and that has everything to do with the way Cambridge Analytica works.
9 April
From Monday, April 9, Facebook will show a link at the top of users’ news feed so that they can see which apps they use and what information they have shared with the relevant apps. Users will then also have the option to delete apps that they no longer wish to use.
And as part of this process, users will also find out here whether information may have been incorrectly shared with Cambridge Analytica. An example of this message can be seen in the image below.