Facebook revealed on Wednesday that 87 million users have been affected by the Cambridge Analytica case, much more than 50 million users initially thought.
The social network giant recently unveiled clearer terms of service to ensure transparency to its users about data sharing.
Facebook’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer provided further details on the case, including new estimations for the number of affected users.
“In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people — mostly in the US — may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica,” Schroepfer said.
The CTO also explained how Facebook is implementing new privacy tools for its users that would be available by next week.
“People will also be able to remove apps that they no longer want. As part of this process we will also tell people if their information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica,” he added.
“Overall, we believe these changes will better protect people’s information while still enabling developers to create useful experiences.”
Next week, on April 11, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg would appear at the Congress to address privacy issues.
The hearing will “be an important opportunity to shed light on critical consumer data privacy issues and help all Americans better understand what happens to their personal information online,” said the committee’s Republican chairman Greg Walden and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone in a statement.
“We appreciate Mr. Zuckerberg’s willingness to testify before the committee, and we look forward to him answering our questions.”
The situation for Facebook could get worse after these last revelations, a few days ago Zuckerberg said it would take “a few years” to fix the problems uncovered by the revelations on data misuse.
Zuckerberg tried to reinforce the positive image of its firms, sustaining that one of the biggest error he made is that Facebook is “idealistic,” the
“Well, I don’t think it’s going to take 20 years. I think the basic point that you’re getting at is that we’re really idealistic. When we started, we thought about how good it would be if people could connect, if everyone had a voice. Frankly, we didn’t spend enough time investing in, or thinking through, some of the downside uses of the tools. So for the first 10 years of the company, everyone was just focused on the positive.” Zuckerberg told Vox.com
“I think now people are appropriately focused on some of the risks and downsides as well. And I think we were too slow in investing enough in that. It’s not like we did nothing. I mean, at the beginning of last year, I think we had 10,000 people working on security. But by the end of this year, we’re going to have 20,000 people working on security.”
In response to the Cambridge Analytica case, Facebook deleted dozens of accounts linked to Russia that were used to spread propaganda.
Facebook announced to have revoked the accounts of 70 Facebook and 65 Instagram accounts and removed 138 Facebook pages controlled by the Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), also known as the Russian troll farm due to its misinformation campaigns.
The unit “has repeatedly used complex networks of inauthentic accounts to deceive and manipulate people who use Facebook, including before, during and after the 2016 US presidential elections,” explained Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos.
Zuckerberg added that the Russian agency“has been using complex networks of fake accounts to deceive people.”
“While we respect people and governments sharing political views on Facebook, we do not allow them to set up fake accounts to do this. When an organization does this repeatedly, we take down all of their pages, including ones that may not be fake themselves.”
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(Security Affairs – Cambridge Analytica, Facebook)
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