Over 1.4 billion users engage with Facebook everyday. That is a huge amount of information that ends up in their hands!
And, in the past week, it was revealed that Facebook was involved in a proposed security breach (with a company no one knew of before now) called Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica is a political consulting firm that provided information to the Trump campaign to assist with “voter-targeting” and all the data, research, analytics and targeting for the campaign. They did this by improperly acquiring data on up to 50 million Facebook users.
So what exactly happened? Kate Losse, a former speechwriter for Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, said it was the “disclosure of Facebook data to outside sources through its [Facebook’s] third party developer platform.” The New York Times and UK media wrote that Cambridge Analytica tried to influence voters using information that was taken from Facebook, therefore impacting the 2016 US Election.
Cambridge Analytica is facing audits by Facebook-hired auditors and investigation by multiple countries, including the UK and the European Union.
European Parliament President Antonio Tajani stated: “This is why we … have to be very strict, understand what happened, how a company that works with Facebook has used personal information for private interests, then we need to intervene. We need rules for this.”
What are your thoughts on this situation? Let us know!