Over 71 million Americans were affected by the data breach.
Photo by Photo Stock Catalog/Flickr, via Thought Catalog.
During the 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica, a data firm funded by the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer, used the personal information of 87 million Facebook users to help Donald Trump win the presidency. Over 70 million of those affected by the breach live in the United States.
The social media company now plans to make big changes to protect its users’ private information. “For the first decade, we really focused on all the good that connecting people brings,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during an April 4 conference call. “But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough. We didn’t focus enough on preventing abuse and thinking through how people could use these tools to do harm as well.”
Starting April 9, Facebook is notifying its users via their newsfeeds if their data was stolen by Cambridge Analytica.
Users whose information was unaffected by the breach will see the notification on the left in the image below. People whose data was used by Cambridge Analytica will see the notification on the right.
Image via Facebook.
The notifications also have a link so that users can see their Facebook apps and the information they’ve shared. Users can also remove the apps they no longer want.
Curious to see what Facebook knows about you? Click here to learn how to download your Facebook data.
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