A new 28-year-old whistleblower in town has blown a big daddy of social media, Facebook, with his revelations how data of more than fifty million were leaked to other companies.
The whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, who used to work with a data mining company, Cambridge Analytica, company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, has revealed to the Observer that how the company used personal information of the users obtained without permission were taken out to build a powerful software program to predict and influence the elections around the world.
Wylie, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”
After this revelation, the European, Indian and the US authorities have started an investigation the matter. Facebook has not only lost billions of money, they have lost thousands of their users. Hashtag #deleteFacebook was trending on Twitter after the co-founder of WhatsApp Brian Acton tweeted: "It is time. #deletefacebook."
The Facebook data breach shook the whole world and prompted thousands of users to deactivate their accounts. There are hundreds of the better-known apps that may be connected to your profile and sharing all your emails, friend list, photos, telephone number, current location, hometown, birthday etc.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had admitted that his company made a huge mistake by trusting Cambridge Analytica and Kogan as they had formally certified that they deleted all improperly acquired data.
"It is against our policies for developers to share data without people's consent, so we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications," Zuckerberg.
In addition to this, he announced a series of steps to fix the problem, "First, we will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well."
"Second, we will restrict developers' data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse. For example, we will remove developers' access to your data if you haven't used their app in 3 months. We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in -- to only your name, profile photo, and email address. We'll require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And we'll have more changes to share in the next few days."