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Facebook has revealed that around 562,120 or nearly 5.6 lakh plus users in India were impacted by the Cambridge Analytica data leaks. According to Facebook, around 335 people in India had installed the app, which is called mydigitallife, and this represented less than 0.1 per cent of the app’s total worldwide installs. Facebook’s latest statement comes even as it has reported that the site’s email and phone search feature was potentially misused by malicious actors and that data of nearly all of its 2 billion users was collected and accessed.
Facebook in a press statement said, “Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do, and we require the same from people who operate apps on Facebook. Cambridge Analytica’s acquisition of Facebook data through the app developed by Dr Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research Limited (“GSR”) happened without our authorization and was an explicit violation of our Platform policies. At no time did Facebook agree to Cambridge Analytica’s use of any Facebook user data that may have been collected by this app, including with respect to users located in India.”
Also read: Facebook admits data of 2 billion users was scraped, collected by ‘malicious actors’
Facebook said it is investigating the specific number of people whose information was accessed by the app. It had currently pegged the number at 87 million, much higher than the 50 million that was reported earlier. The app violated Facebook rules by accessing a user’s friends’ data as well, even if they had not installed the app. The data obtained by mydigitallife was later shared with Cambridge Analytica, which was another violation of Facebook’s terms and conditions for app developers.
Read more: Who needs your data? And should you be worried?
The company says that in India only 335 people installed the app, which is 0.1 per cent of the app’s total worldwide installs. The statement adds, “We further understand that 562,120 additional people in India were potentially affected, as friends of people who installed the App. This yields a total of 562,455 potentially affected people in India, which is 0.6% of the global number of potentially affected people.”
Earlier Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement to the press saying that the company had failed to do the right thing by not protecting user data. “We didn’t take a broad enough view of what our responsibility is, and that was a huge mistake. It was my mistake,” he said in a press interaction. It also looks like Zuckerberg will testify before the US Congress by April 10 or April 11, according to reports.
