THUR, APRIL 12 2018-theG&BJournal-Many Nigerian Facebook users may have unwittingly exposed their private conversations to data harvesters at Cambridge Anyalytica when they or their friends logged into ‘This is Your Life’ quiz, an app designed by Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan and his firm, Global Science Research in 2014, to collect data on Americans.
Experts reckon that about 1 million or more may have left their data vulnerable by using the app directly or indirectly through the Facebook friends who use the app. It is not certain the types of characters that may have taken advantage of the quiz app but there are doubts that cyber-criminals would be involved. Users who gave permission for the quiz to run also granted it permission to mine their profile for additional information, including their page ‘likes’, their birthday and the city they live in.
The disclosure hidden in a new tool on Facebook revealed the possibility that Users of Facebook Messenger is among data harvested by Cambridge Anyalytica. This information was not previously disclosed by the social networking site but it is said to have been silently slipped into the fine print of a ‘Protecting Your Information’ app created recently to address concerns over the data leak that put Cambridge Analytica on the spotlight.
Some of the social network’s 2.2 billion users have already begun to receive automatic notifications on their newsfeed as part of a gradual global rollout. Many privacy concerned users of Facebook users, particularly in Nigeria, are yet to receive the message but can access the information manually from a section of Facebook Help Center.
Elsewhere, in South Africa its believed that about 60,000 users data may also have been harnessed. Cambridge Analytica has denied the claims that it accessed private message data. In a media statement a spokesperson for Facebook said while only 33 South Africans installed the app, data of 59 777 South African users was potentially shared.
Facebook founder Mark Zukerberg who is currently facing US lawmakers grilling on the data scandal refused to answer questions on how much data Facebook collects on users and non-users as well but struggled to dispel notions that facebook sells user data.
Facebook last week that said information of up to 87 million people worldwide may have been improperly shared by the app’s creator with Cambridge Analytica. The majority of those impacted were in the US.
