Data From Millions Of Facebook Users Said To Have Been Harvested To Influence Political Voting

FACEBOOK USER DATA was allegedly used to influence voters in the EU referendum and the US Presidential election of 2016, with British firm Cambridge Analytica making use of information illegally gleaned from 50 million Facebook users.

It’s well known that Facebook has a treasure trove of data used to target advertising and products at its users. But third parties and developers can only harvest user data if it’s used to improve their services and apps; they cannot sell it on.

Back in 2014, Cambridge University academic Dr Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app called ‘this is your digital life’ and encouraged approximately 270,000 Facebook users to find out what their personality type was, under the knowledge they were agreeing to have their data accessed for academic research.

Facebook had a fairly relaxed policy towards who could tap into its data back then, allowing app developers to access information on users and their friends, even though consent to do so only came from an app’s user. With this in place, data on a couple of hundred thousand people turned into a mass of information from tens of millions of Facebook users.