Facebook is taking new cautionary measures after the recent Cambridge Analytica incident.
The recent event with Cambridge Analytica was a breach of trust from Facebook. People use the popular social media app and website to connect with their friends and family. Now, users don’t feel confident that their data is private only to those they authorize it to anymore.
The techies at Facebook are going to look at the current policies will make corrections to their API, as well as have tighter policies, about who gets certain information.
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Owner and creator of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, gave his thoughts on the current situation in a recent post on his account. He says that Facebook “has a responsibility to protect your data, and if [we] can’t then [we] do not deserve to serve you.”
Zuckerberg reviews the timeline stating, “In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app. It was installed by around 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends' data.” In 2015, Facebook learned that Kogan shared data from his app, against Facebook policies. Facebook received certification that Kogan, and Cambridge Analytica, destroyed “all improperly acquired data.”
Last week, it was learned that Cambridge Analytica might not have deleted the information, as they had previously said. They were immediately banned from using all services on the Facebook site and the app, agreeing to an audit by a private firm.
The fallout of this and what it means to Facebook users is this:
Facebook will use the following six steps to make the services more secure to the users.
- Facebook will review the platform and look at the apps that have access to large amounts of data and run an audit on any app with suspicious activity.
- They will alert the users affected by any misuse, including a way to see if an app has accessed your data inappropriately.
- Facebook will turn off access from unused apps and prevent an app that hasn’t been used by a user for 3 months from accessing any more of their data.
- They will restrict Facebook login data. This means that they will reduce the data that an app can request without approval.
- Facebook will encourage people to manage the apps they use by making the app-usage-data they already show you easier to manage.
- Lastly, they will reward people who find vulnerabilities. Calling on the tech community that uses Facebook means that people can report any misuses of data by app developers that they find.
Over the next few weeks, Facebook will talk to users to having more control over their data. Some updates are already in the works and some will be added to the policies in the next updates.
Give us your thoughts on the Cambridge Analytica debacle and what you think of Facebook’s response.