brontech Tweets thread to stay updated, page-128

While not inherently a tweet, still related to Brontech's goal of data security - another confirmation of data leak from now Facebook.
  
Facebook says 310,000 Australian users may have been affected by Cambridge Analytica scandal
By Rachel Clun

Updated5 April 2018 — 8:48amfirst published at 5:30am


The data of more than 310,000 Australian Facebook users may have been “improperly shared” with Cambridge Analytica, the social media company has revealed.
Facebook said it believes the information of up to 87 million people was potentially shared with the research company, but said they did not know exactly what data Cambridge Analytica was given or the exact number of people affected.


The data firm was "playing with the psychology of an entire nation," by harvesting and using over 50 million Facebook user's private information for Trump's presidential campaign, says whistleblower Christopher Wylie.
This is Facebook's first official confirmation of the possible scope of the data leak, with the number of affected users previously estimated at roughly 50 million in news reports.
Facebook estimates up to 311,127 Australians were affected.
“Using as expansive a methodology as possible, this is our best estimate of the maximum number of unique accounts that directly installed the thisisyourdigitallife app as well as those whose data may have been shared with the app by their friends,” the company said.
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About 270,000 people downloaded a personality quiz app and shared information about themselves and their friends with a researcher, who then passed along the information to Cambridge Analytica, in a move that Facebook says was against its rules. Facebook reached the 87 million figure by adding up all the unique people that those 270,000 users were friends with at the time they gave the app permission. Facebook made the new disclosure in an online posting Wednesday.
'My mistake': Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg.
Photo: AP
Cambridge Analytica said that it licensed data on 30 million people, countering Facebook's 87 million estimate. Cambridge Analytica said in a tweet that it "immediately deleted the raw data from our file server, and began the process of searching for and removing any of its derivatives in our system" after Facebook contacted them to let them know data had been improperly obtained.
Facebook says it will tell people, in a notice at the top of their news feeds starting April 9, if their information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica. But it still hasn't independently confirmed if the firm currently has the data. The revelation hints at the grilling Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg will likely have to face when he testifies on the matter before Congress next week.
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In a conference call, Zuckerberg told reporters that he accepted blame for the data leak.
"When you're building something like Facebook that is unprecedented in the world, there are going to be things that you mess up," he said.
"We didn't take a broad enough view of what our responsibility was and that was a huge mistake. It was my mistake."
"We're broadening our view of our responsibility."
The company has been embroiled in controversy for weeks over the revelation that data was shared and then not deleted. It raised questions over the reams of data Facebook compiles on users, makes available to third parties, and what happens to it afterward. Facebook made the announcement along with an update on its plans to restrict data access through its platform.
In a wide-ranging post, Facebook also said the data on most of its two billion users could have been accessed improperly as it announced it had removed a tool that let users enter phone numbers or email addresses into Facebook's search tool to find other people. That was being used by malicious actors to scrape public profile information, it explained.
"Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we've seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way," the company said. "So we have now disabled this feature."
Shares in Facebook were down 0.7 per cent on Wednesday to $US155.10. They are down more than 15 per cent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke.