Facebook has begun informing its users which of the 87 million of them had their information gathered and used by Cambridge Analytica for… oh, various unpleasant things, like influencing votes and elections and things of that nature.
But you don’t have to wait for Facebook to broadcast a warning at the top of your news feed, which is how the company is going about it. There are other ways that you can find out whether you were one of the estimated 60,000 South Africans effected.
The shortest possible way to see if Facebook shared your information with Cambridge Analytica is to head to this link while logged into your Facebook account. Facebook will inform you whether you or your friends were effected by the Cambridge Analytica data siphon, based on whether you (or one of the folks on your friends list) took the This Is Your Digital Life quiz. If you were that person, we hope you’ve learned your lesson about Facebook quizzes.
You can also take the long way around and head to Facebook’s help page and then type in your question about Cambridge Analytica. But clicking the link in the paragraph above is a whole lot faster.
What is most disconcerting about Facebook’s current scandal is that it didn’t take many folks to hoover up a large quantity of users. The Verge notes that only 10 people from New Zealand downloaded the quiz in question but some 63,714 of that country’s users had their information scooped by Cambridge Analytica, and there’s reason to believe that there were similar issues in other countries as well. That’s quite a depressing, though effective, illustration of the power of online connections.
Source: via The Guardian