Facebook says 59,777 of its users in South Africa could potentially have been impacted in the Cambridge Analytica debacle that has seen the personal data of millions of users of the social network compromised, or at least used for purposes other than those for which it was intended.
The South African office for Facebook shared the information on Friday afternoon. It says 33 users in South Africa installed the offending app, and that this translates to almost 60,000 potentially impacted users, “these being friends of those who would have installed the app elsewhere in the world”.
In the wake of the scandal, Facebook has announced a number of changes to the service, including a forthcoming prompt that’ll encourage all users to check with which apps its consented to sharing data.
Facebook’s had a torrid couple of weeks, with various online campaigns urging users to delete their accounts, the market punishing its share price, and even calls for CEO Mark Zuckerberg to step down (with some likening the recent woes to those of Uber before its founder and CEO Travis Kalanick stepped aside). Now the giant of social media is going to great lengths to reassure users and offer greater clarity on which information on users it collects and how it’s used.
If it’s been a while since you dug about in Facebook’s privacy settings now’s a good time to change that.