Facebook would have admitted during the last night that the data of the majority of users of the social media platform would have been accessed in an unauthorized way by various entities during the last years, without their knowledge. The disclosure comes alongside another that says the data of 87 million people was accessed exclusively by Cambridge Analytica, but this is only one of the companies that accessed the data of, apparently, perhaps even more than 1 billion users.
Facebook has started to eliminate the functions that allowed so many companies to take so much data about users, two of them allowing people to be searched based on their phone number or email address. Facebook claims that by searching within its platform, various companies have accessed a lot of user data, in some cases these accesses seem to have been done in an unauthorized manner, according to the American company.
Facebook - the data of the majority of users accessed without authorization
Facebook claims that it did not think from the very beginning how dangerous offering this functionality could be for the social media platform, and now claims that it has learned its lesson and that it wants to protect us. The elimination of this function will certainly provide more trust in the Facebook social network, and for now, theoretically, no one will be able to search for us based on an email address or a phone number, in order to be able to connect the data .
"Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we've seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way. So we have now disabled this feature. We didn't take a broad enough view of what our responsibility was and that was a huge mistake. It was my mistake. We're broadening our view of our responsibility."
Yesterday, Facebook also announced a new set of rules on how data can be accessed by everyone, the change aiming to simplify the explanations for those who want to read them. Today's disclosure shows us that Facebook left us all vulnerable to companies that wanted to extract information about users and combine it with phone numbers and email addresses.
