Facebook reeling over massive data breach

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are reeling following revelations of a massive data breach that affected tens of millions of people. Legalbrief reports that the data company is being investigated in two inquiries in the UK and one in the US, as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into whether Trump aides colluded with Russia in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election. Damien Collins, the head of the UK’s parliamentary committee investigating fake news, has accused both companies of misleading MPs after revelations in The Observer that more than 50m Facebook profiles were harvested and used to build a system that may have influenced voters in the election campaign. Collins said he would call the heads of both companies, Alexander Nix and Mark Zuckerberg, to give further testimony. In the US, the two men may also face a summons from US lawmakers. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called for Cambridge Analytica to be ‘thoroughly investigated’ and said Facebook must answer questions about how it came to provide private user information to an academic with links to Russia. ‘This raises serious questions about the level of detail that Cambridge Analytica knew about users, whether it acquired that information illegally and whether it sought to abuse that information in support of President Trump’s political campaign in the US or Brexit in the United Kingdom,’ the report quotes him as saying. CNN reports that Cambridge Analytica yesterday (Tuesday) suspended CEO Alexander Nix 'pending a full, independent investigation'. The statement was released moments before Channel 4 News in the UK was due to air another report in a series of exposés about the work of the company. The report featured undercover footage of Nix claiming he met Trump 'many times' and that the company was responsible for a wide swath of the Trump campaign's activity.

Full report in The Observer

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Facebook has told CNN that it is looking into ties between one of its current employees and Cambridge Analytica, the controversial data firm that was suspended by Facebook on Friday. Joseph Chancellor, now a researcher at Facebook, was a director of Global Science Research, a company that provided data to Cambridge Analytica. The revelations have prompted renewed scrutiny of how Facebook was used to reach and influence voters ahead of the 2016 US presidential election. ‘Joseph Chancellor is an employee of Facebook. We are looking into the situation,’ a spokesperson for Facebook reportedly told CNN. On Friday, Facebook announced it was suspending Cambridge Analytica and data scientist Aleksandr Kogan, Chancellor's former business colleague, from using its platform while it investigates the matter. Facebook said Kogan ‘lied to us’ and ‘violated’ its policies in 2015 ‘by passing data’ to a third party, including Cambridge Analytica. A report on the EWN site notes that Facebook shares closed down nearly 7.0% on Monday, wiping nearly $40bn off its market value as investors worried that new legislation could damage the company’s advertising business. ‘The lid is being opened on the black box of Facebook data practices, and the picture is not pretty,’ said Frank Pasquale, a University of Maryland law professor who has written about Silicon Valley’s use of data. Also on Monday, a source said that Facebook head of security, Alex Stamos, plans to leave the company over disagreements about the company’s policies on misinformation. He had been a strong advocate for an aggressive approach to alleged Russian activity on the platform aimed at manipulating elections. In another development, investors are suing Facebook in the wake of the scandal, according to CNN. Facebook shareholder Fan Yuan filed the lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco yesterday (Tuesday). The lawsuit was brought on behalf of an undisclosed number of investors who bought Facebook shares between 3 February, 2017, and 19 March, 2018. The lawsuit said Facebook 'made materially false and misleading statements' about the company's policies, and claims Facebook did not disclose that it allowed third parties to access data on millions of people without their knowledge.

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Full report on the EWN site

http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/07/technology/nicehash-bitcoin-theft-hacking/index.html

If the revelations that Cambridge Analytica acquired the records of 50m Facebook users has you wondering how to protect your own personal information, you may already have discovered the maze of privacy settings the social networking site offers. First, the good news: the feature that allowed the most egregious data harvesting used by the company that gave Cambridge Analytica its data is no longer on the site. Before 2016, Facebook apps could ask for permission to access not only your own data, but also the data of all your friends on the platform. That means that around 300 000 people could sign up for a personality test quiz, and in the process hand over information of 150 times that number. However, The Guardian reports that Facebook apps are now only allowed to gather information from users who have directly signed up for them, greatly limiting their reach. That change was made in 2014, and rolled out to every Facebook app over the course of 2015.

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