87 million users affected by Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal
Facebook has revealed that a maximum of 87 million users could have been affected by the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. This is much higher than the previous figure of 50 million. While over 70 million of the affected Facebook users are from the US; Philippines, Indonesia, and the UK all have over 1 million affected users each. India has over 6.5 lakh (0.6%) affected users.
Facebook to notify all affected users
This comes as part of Facebook's latest announcement where CTO Mike Schoepfer has detailed the changes that the company is making to protect user data and become stricter about the activities of third-party apps. Starting April 9, Facebook will notify affected users about their personal information that might have been harvested and showcase its new bulk app permission removal tool atop their News Feed.
Facebook restricts access to Events API, Groups API
Facebook's Events API can now only be accessed by developers who adhere to its stricter policies and even they can't access the guest list or an event wall. Developers will also have to get approval from Facebook and a group administrator to use the Groups API, and even the permitted apps can't access the member list or names and profile photos attached to posts/comments.
...and Pages API, Instagram API
Facebook will also require approving access to the Pages API. Earlier, any third-party app could use the Pages API to read posts or comments on public Facebook pages. The Instagram API has also been restricted to disable access to followers, relationships, and public comments.
Facebook will note if app not used in 3 months
Further, if a user has not opened Facebook in three months, apps will no longer be able to access their personal data like religious views, political affiliation, relationship status, friends list, education and work history, and preferences in books, music, news, and games. This way, developers won't be able to use Facebook data to integrate their products into a user's online life.
You can no longer search by entering phone number, email!
Facebook has made changes to its account recovery feature to reduce data scraping. It has also disabled the capability of entering users' phone number or email address to find them on the website. On Messenger, Facebook is restricting collection of call and text history to only the data required to offer the service. Further, all Messenger logs will now be deleted after a year.
