By now, everyone has been clued in on the controversy involving Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.
Thanks to a report by Mashable’s Rachel Thompson, we were directed to a tweet by Next Web’s Matt Navarra, who provided the link to the new FB tool.
Cambridge Analytica ? which is a UK-based consulting firm specializing in data mining, data brokerage, and data analysis with strategic communication for the electoral process ? is accused of hijacking the information of up to 87 million Facebook users. It turns out the firm harvested data through an app called?”This Is Your Digital Life.”
The data was reportedly used to manipulate people and influence the electoral process of countries such as the US and the Philippines.
In fact a Newsbytes.PH report revealed: “According to Facebook?s estimates, people from the Philippines ranked the second highest (1,175,870) next to the United States (70,632,350), followed by Indonesia (1,096,666), then the United Kingdom (1,079,031) as the most affected by Cambridge Analytica?s data mining operations.”
Here’s how you find out if your FB data got hijacked. You just have to log on to your FB account and click this link.
To date, FB founder Mark Zuckerberg has been dealing with the fallout of this data breach mess. A copy of Zuckerberg’s prepared testimony for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce has been released to the public. In it, he states, “Over the past few weeks, we?ve been working to understand exactly what happened with Cambridge Analytica and taking steps to make sure this doesn?t happen again. We took important actions to prevent this from happening again today four years ago, but we also made mistakes, there?s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.”
Meanwhile, Facebook users should probably start learning how not to share too much on the social media platform. FB is a powerful entity, but keep in mind that it only has that much power over your data if you let it infiltrate your life so much. Maybe dial down your enthusiasm for sharing everything that happens in your life. There’s always email and the phone, which are relatively safer than social media platforms, if you really must reach out to your friends and loved ones.
