PARIS – Facebook is at the centre of controversy yet again after admittingthat up to 50 million accounts were breached by hackers.
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said engineers discovered thebreach on Tuesday, and patched it on Thursday night.
“We don’t know if any accounts were actually misused,” Zuckerberg said. “Weface constant attacks from people who want to take over accounts or stealinformation around the world.”
Facebook reset the 50 million breached accounts, meaning users will need tosign back in using passwords. It also reset “access tokens” for another 40million accounts as a precautionary measure.
Here is a roundup of the scandals dogging the social media giant:
*Cambridge Analytica*
In Facebook’s telling, everything goes back to 2013 when Russian-Americanresearcher Aleksandr Kogan creates a personality prediction test app,”thisisyourdigitallife”, which is offered on the social network.
Around 300,000 people download the app, authorising access to informationon their profile and also to the data of their Facebook friends.
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In 2015 Facebook makes changes to its privacy policy and preventsthird-party apps from accessing the data of users’ friends without theirconsent.
The same year the social network discovers Kogan has passed on theinformation retrieved via his app to the British company CambridgeAnalytica (CA), which specialises in the analysis of data and strategiccommunication.
In 2016 CA is hired by Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign.
Facebook says it was assured by CA in 2015 that the data in question hadbeen erased. But it estimates the firm could have had access to the data ofup to 87 million users, most in the United States, without their consent,and mined this information to serve the Trump campaign.
Cambridge Analytica, which denies the accusations, has since filed forvoluntary bankruptcy in the United States and Britain. – APP/AFP
