

#How to deactivate facebook account on phone how to#
I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again. “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you. It was only years later - after he had been called out by the press and authorities alike - that Mark Zuckerberg addressed the breach and admitted that his company lost control of their data. While there’s no way to determine the exact impact the Cambridge Analytica scandal had on the 2016 election, it’s extremely concerning that a data breach could have played a role in who became President of the United States.ĭespite becoming aware of the data breach in 2015, Facebook kept all wrongdoings on behalf of Cambridge Analytica a secret from the public. The end goal was to make people more agreeable to any proposals the Trump campaign put forth.Ĭambridge Analytica was able to access nearly every aspect of the violated users’ lives, using their status updates, likes, pages visited, and more to specifically target them and influence their perception of certain political candidates.įacebook let the data of their users be used to misinform and sway the political ideology of millions of people. Their tactics included buying ads which only displayed on certain users’ profiles and directing users to external content that aligned with the political leanings hinted at in their Facebook account.

The report claimed that not only did Facebook never delete the data but that it had been used to influence voters leading all the way back to 2015. Then in March of 2018, the New York Times published a damning report with firsthand accounts from employees of Cambridge Analytica at the time of the breach.

Kogan to Cambridge Analytica in 2015, at which point they deleted his survey application and investigated to make sure the 50 million profiles had been deleted from Analytica’s servers. Many believe this misuse of sensitive information played a large role in Donald Trump swaying the election in his favor.įacebook says that it noticed the transfer of the data from Dr. Analytica then turned around and used the data to target people and influence them to vote for the Republican ticket in the 2016 presidential election. See, although Facebook states explicitly in their Terms of Service that no user data can be acquired or purchased for the purpose of marketing or advertising, the social networking giant does allow data troves to be used for what the company deems as “academic purposes”.Ĭambridge Analytica purchased the data from Kogan (an academic researcher) and used this loophole in Facebook’s ToS to acquire data on over 50 million US users, making it the largest data breach of personal information in modern history. Around 270,000 people willingly signed up for the survey, but the questionnaire wasn’t as innocent as it seemed. In 2013 Russian researcher Alexsander Kogan developed an application for Facebook that allowed users to take a survey regarding their political leanings.
