Facebook Sold your Personal Data to Trump

 

Facebook has never faced a scandal like the one it’s currently fighting through. Revelations over the weekend about its reckless sharing of user data with Trump sent its stock price plunging and fresh calls for regulations on the social media network are looking more real than ever Facebook has known since 2015 that Cambridge Analytica, a data-mining company hired by President Trump’s election campaign, improperly obtained the personal data of 50 million of the network’s users and the social giant failed to do much of anything about it.

 

after years of Facebook big shots telling us to just trust them when it comes to the ways it handles our data and targets us with advertising, a third-party allegedly violated Facebook’s trust. In the past, the company has met such scandals with a mixture of outright denials and promises to change, while mostly maintaining the status quo and its bottom line just kept growing. On Monday, early market signs showed the dam could be breaking.

Facebook has suspended Cambridge Analytica, the test creator Aleksandr Kogan and even whistleblower Chris Wylie over the revelations despite Wylie’s claims that they’ve known about the process for two years

Should you delete Facebook account ?

If you’ve been using Facebook since the beginning then you’ve already been living in a world of highly targeted advertising for years: it’s a phenomenon most internet users are used to by now. The scary thing about Cambridge Analytica’s method is that users weren’t being shown stuff they’d been googling or browsing on Amazon they had been profiled without even knowing it. If Facebook was an American voter’s primary way of learning about the two candidates in 2016’s Presidential election – something 26% of Brits admitted to during the 2017 UK election – then these voters were individually being sold Trump based on the kind of person Cambridge Analytica knew they were.

avoid this kind of data breach being used to target you, you need to be very careful about the data permissions you give to your connected apps but even if you do that, you’re still at risk of your friends offering your data to third parties when they give their apps certain permissions