Facebook says Cambridge Analytica may have collected data on up to 87M people
Cambridge Analytica may have harvested the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users, Facebook's CTO said on Wednesday, a number far higher than original media estimates.
Most of the affected people -- over 70 million -- were in the U.S., Mike Schroepfer wrote in an official blog post, discussing plans to limit the data accessible by third-party apps. This includes more restrictions on what developers can request through Facebook logins, and what's accessible through Events, Groups, and Pages APIs.
Initial reports from March pegged Cambridge Analytica's data trove at about 50 million users. The political consulting firm abused Facebook's 2014 privacy policies to scrape data on the non-consenting friends of people who used a particular research app. While Facebook later tightened its policies, Cambridge Analytica was able to build "psychographic" profiles of U.S. voters that did not opt-in to the company's data collection.
The fallout from the revelations has been severe, not just for Cambridge Analytica but for Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The company's stock has taken a beating, and executives have been put on the defensive. Zuckerberg is set to testify in front of the U.S. Congress next week.
The situation has even prompted a minor war of words between Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
"The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer -- if our customer was our product," Cook said recently, adding that he would never find himself in Zuckerberg's shoes. Apple has regularly positioned itself as a pro-privacy company, famously resisting Justice Department demands for a backdoor into iOS, though it has complied with the authoritarian Chinese government on matters of censorship and localizing iCloud data.
"You know, I find that argument, that if you're not paying that somehow we can't care about you, to be extremely glib," Zuckerberg responded through a Vox interview. He argued that to build a service "which is not just serving rich people," a free ad-based model is essential.
"I don't think at all that that means that we don't care about people. To the contrary, I think it's important that we don't all get Stockholm Syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you. Because that sounds ridiculous to me," he continued.
In a Twitter post, Cambridge Analytica has denied the scope alleged by Facebook.
"Cambridge Analytica licensed data from GSR for 30 million individuals, not 87 million," the firm wrote. "We did not receive more than 30 million records from research company GSR."
Most of the affected people -- over 70 million -- were in the U.S., Mike Schroepfer wrote in an official blog post, discussing plans to limit the data accessible by third-party apps. This includes more restrictions on what developers can request through Facebook logins, and what's accessible through Events, Groups, and Pages APIs.
Initial reports from March pegged Cambridge Analytica's data trove at about 50 million users. The political consulting firm abused Facebook's 2014 privacy policies to scrape data on the non-consenting friends of people who used a particular research app. While Facebook later tightened its policies, Cambridge Analytica was able to build "psychographic" profiles of U.S. voters that did not opt-in to the company's data collection.
The fallout from the revelations has been severe, not just for Cambridge Analytica but for Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The company's stock has taken a beating, and executives have been put on the defensive. Zuckerberg is set to testify in front of the U.S. Congress next week.
The situation has even prompted a minor war of words between Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
"The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer -- if our customer was our product," Cook said recently, adding that he would never find himself in Zuckerberg's shoes. Apple has regularly positioned itself as a pro-privacy company, famously resisting Justice Department demands for a backdoor into iOS, though it has complied with the authoritarian Chinese government on matters of censorship and localizing iCloud data.
"You know, I find that argument, that if you're not paying that somehow we can't care about you, to be extremely glib," Zuckerberg responded through a Vox interview. He argued that to build a service "which is not just serving rich people," a free ad-based model is essential.
"I don't think at all that that means that we don't care about people. To the contrary, I think it's important that we don't all get Stockholm Syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you. Because that sounds ridiculous to me," he continued.
In a Twitter post, Cambridge Analytica has denied the scope alleged by Facebook.
"Cambridge Analytica licensed data from GSR for 30 million individuals, not 87 million," the firm wrote. "We did not receive more than 30 million records from research company GSR."
Comments
Keep on using Facebook guys.
This is news doesn’t seem to matter.
It's entrenched in the user settings, but one can download "everything" about you to maintain transparency. I was actually surprised as to what was in there that would concern me. Nothing. Seriously... a lot of was data about what I did on FB, what I liked, the sites/ads I interacted with, etc...
Typical media and political witch hunt as far as I'm concerned.
People and the feds should be much more harsh with Equifax as that data can genuinely cause damage to my financial life. If people want to know that I liked a George Takei post, go right ahead.
You are on Facebook. They collect your data (especially when you agree) and they target ads at you. That is what they do.
People are worked up because the ads were political. It's not like they stole your money. Facebook is free. Ignore the ads if you don't like them.
Are people angry on the behalf of people whose opinions are swayed but didn't know it? So what, same thing happens every time you see a politician speak or put and ad on TV. And they all have spin and god knows almost none of it is based in fact.
Who cares? All sides have been targeting people this way for a long time.
Ok, they gathered data that, only some of which was supposed to be shared and used it to put an ad in your feed. It's not like they were giving away your credit card data. Hell, Google scrubs my personal email for keywords to target ads and that seems way more intrusive.
Ignore the ads and move on with your life.
I do it everyday on Facebook.
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Not trying to antagonize anyone here, Mike but use of the term "laissez faire" in this context I find humorously ironic.
Definition: "abstention by governments from interfering in the workings of the free market"
Definitely shouldn't have happened. But the question I'm asking is, what was the harm done here? So your friends got targeted with some different ads than the other targeted ads facebook would have alternatively sent you? You were still going to get Facebook ads in those "slots". And even more ironic is that the ads were probably perfectly suited to the people getting them.
I'll give you a far worse example, I once used TrueGreen for lawn service. I am now on their calling list. For the first two years after I cancelled my service (and continued to a lesser degree since), they called me probably 3 times a week on my cell phone during work hours. I have asked to be removed from their list but they kept calling. All from different phone numbers so they couldn't be blocked. Now THAT is a violation of privacy and intrusive. Barring trying to sue them at great personal expense, I don't see how I could make that stop. I'm sure they have done this to millions of people. Why is nobody up in arms about something like that? It's far worse than the Facebook situation. I wish Truegreen had been showing me facebook ads, because 1. I could have ignored them and 2. I could have said, don't show me ads like this again.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-04/facebook-says-data-on-87-million-people-may-have-been-shared
It really is a company run by vampires. I've may have missed the mention of the controversial 2016 memo by a FaceBook VP on AI, but that memo is probably something that should make people aware of what the real cost of using FB is.
Connected, yes, but at what cost?