Cambridge Analytica Sold Facebook Members Data, So? Is it Safe?

Cambridge Analytica Sold Facebook Members Data, So? Is it Safe?

Source : Stabroek News

In 2014, an individual named Aleksandr Kogan created an app to understand the personality of different individuals for Cambridge Analytica.

He collected details of 50 million facebook users including the people who downloaded it and thier friends as well.

The most significant and dangerous fact was that these collected data's can be used to bring a massive change to political strength of different parties.

What Actually Happened?

Now Third party applications are available in Facebook. These third party applications are not developed by Facebook, but some other developers. These applications are available with Facebook permissions.

The benefit of these kind of applications are that, advertisements will be available  and through which they can make money.

As i have mentioned before that these apps are functioned with Facebook permission. Because of that when the user enter the applications he/she is sharing profile, email, address, friends list, likes with the app developer.

With the data obtained from this they learn each and every individual. So the researchers are able to get data's more than what the actual individual know about themselves using machine learning.

This is actually getting into our privacy policy. As per Facebook privacy policy , our details won't be shared with any developers.

You might have see things like " whom will you look like when you grow up?" "Predict your love" have you noticed these kind of apps with the heads?. Well then you need to know that these apps actually asks for permission before it loads to access our data.

What is the role of Facebook?

In 2014, Aleksandr Kogan found a gap in the Facebook security which helped him to obtain data's of 50 million users using his application.

When a user uses the application, Aleksandr Kogan was not only getting the particular individuals data but also his friends list.

Like that he obtained 50 million data's from 27 lacks users.

Even though Facebook technicians found the gaps and closed it but it was too late. In 2016 , Facebook authority contacted the Cambridge Analytica and assured to delete the details they obtained.

But in the Sri Lankan election Cambride Analytica tried to use the same data to to bribe. Then we all got to know about this issue.

How it will affect us?

I will tell you what you all will think. Well, these things happened in America right? so whats there to worry? Nothing like that will happen over here.

We all browse everyday, so the advertising companies are learning what we like and showing us advertisements related to that. 

So image to how far they can utilize this for political favor.

Even though we do not have any benefit from the app why do we have to share our personal details with unwanted developers? have you thought about it?

If any of our friends are using any of these application we nee to inform them about the incidents that are happening around and what is the benefit from these third party apps?

According to Facebook new updates all these issues have been sorted out.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg officially apologized to the users and he accepted the fault. The Cambridge Analytica CEO was fired from the company as well.

When the Cambridge Analytica news came out, Whats app co founder announced that every user should delete their Facebook account.

So from all these what we have to understand is that , The value of these data's are worth more than what we think. So to all the Facebook users try to stay away from all the third party applications.

Source : The Quint