Last Wednesday, Facebook announced
that as many as 87 million people may have had private data
surreptitiously harvested by voter-profiling firm Cambridge Analytica in
the lead up to the 2016 presidential election. It's a total that's
millions higher than the initial, still horrifying reports. Are you one of the people effected? Starting today, Facebook is letting people know.
The notification comes by way of a message you'll find pinned atop your newsfeed (if you haven't already deactivated or deleted your account)
and will manifest in one of the two ways shown below. The shorter
version means your data wasn't taken—at least not by this company, in
this instance. The longer version means it was.
This notification comes along with a host of
changes to the Facebook API that are ostensibly designed to prevent a
similar breach from happening in the future. This, of course, does
nothing to change the fact that Facebook's business model is designed
around collecting and collating information about you and selling it to
advertisers, though you can take steps to limit the information it has access to. The only way to really make sure your data is safe with Facebook is to limit how much of it they have.
