[Guardian] The Facebook data of up to 87 million people ‐ 37 million more than previously reported ‐ may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, the company has revealed.This larger figure, which included over a million UK users, was buried in the penultimate paragraph of a blogpost by the company’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, published on Wednesday, which also provided updates on the changes Facebook was making to better protect user information.
Mark Zuckerberg, during a conference call shortly after the post was published, said: "We didn’t take a broad enough view on what our responsibility was and that was a huge mistake. That was my mistake."
Skipping down a bit
The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by Cambridge University academic Aleksandr Kogan through his company Global Science Research in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica. Hundreds of thousands of users were paid a small fee to take a personality test and they consented to have their data collected.
Aleksandr Kogan aka Aleksandr Spectre
However, the app also harvested the information of the participants’ friends, which allowed for the accumulation of data from tens of millions of Americans.
Self-enrollment! Social network analysis made very easy. Seems harmless, what could possibly go wrong.