Facebook sends ‘privacy message’ to users

Starting on Monday, the 87 million Facebook users who might have had their data shared with Cambridge Analytic would be getting a detailed message on their news feeds.

Facebook says that most of the affected users (more than 70 million) are in the U.S., though there are over a million each in the Philippines, Indonesia and the U.K.

Shared data

In addition, all 2.2 billion Facebook users will receive a notice titled “Protecting Your Information” with a link to see what apps they use and what information they have shared with those apps. If they want, they can shut off apps individually or turn off third-party access to their apps completely.

Reeling from its worst privacy crisis in history, Facebook is in full damage-control mode. CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that he made a “huge mistake” in failing to take a broad enough view of what Facebook’s responsibility is in the world. He’s set to testify before Congress next week.

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie previously estimated that more than 50 million people were compromised by a personality quiz that collected data from users and their friends. In an interview aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press”, Mr. Wylie said the true number could be even larger than 87 million.

Numbers unclear

That Facebook app, called “This is Your Digital Life,” was a personality quiz created in 2014 by an academic researcher named Aleksander Kogan, who paid about 2,70,000 people to take it.

Mr. Zuckerberg said that Facebook came up with the 87 million figure by calculating the maximum number of friends that users could have had while Mr. Kogan’s app was collecting data.

Cambridge Analytica said in a statement last Wednesday that it had data for only 30 million Facebook users.