Facebook will inform you this Monday if your data was stolen

Facebook - data was stolen

1. Facebook wanted to obtain the medical records of its users
2. Facebook admits that 137,000 were affected by Cambridge Analytics data theft

Facebook will communicate within four days to up to 137,000 Spanish users that the personal data they entered to register in the social network and that have remained active over the last few years have been captured by Cambridge Analytica, the marketing company accused of manipulating electoral processes in the United States and the United Kingdom over the past two years.

"Starting next Monday, April 9 we will show people a link on their wall so they can see what applications they use and the information they have shared with those applications," explained Mike Schroepfer, the company's head of technology development. The exercise is part of a renewal of the conditions of access to the data of more than 2,000 million users around the world from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. " We will also tell people if your information has been shared inappropriately by CA" .

The data collected by CA from Facebook was obtained through an application called this is your digital life in which users responded to a personality questionnaire that was then used to outline its political orientation, social stratum ... It was installed by 300,000 users of the network and "given the way our platform worked means that it could access the data of tens of millions of friends," Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged last March.

This figure was finalized on Wednesday - according to estimations of the company itself - in 87 million people . The virility in Facebook and the lack of controls over the access and storage of information allow this scale of access to data by third parties. In fact since 2007 when the opening of data and images was encouraged to all kinds of applications with "social" character as was the case with this is your digital life . In Spain, admitted yesterday Facebook, the data of up to 137,000 users were captured by CA from only 44 people who downloaded the application that proposed a personality test "for academic purposes."

Zuckerberg himself acknowledged on Wednesday night in a telephone interview with various international media, including this newspaper, that he never answered this type of tests and that he maintains a privacy policy that is much stricter than most users of his social network. Also that the social network that he founded in 2004 has become "very complex" so it is not enough to snap your fingers to apply improvements that will require "years".

Even so, despite admitting errors and promising to "broaden the focus of their responsibilities", the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AGPD) yesterday opened an investigation to determine whether the company has violated, again, the Data Protection Law in our country.

The penalties prior to Facebook in Spain have been imposed for not having the consent of the users for the treatment of data or for excessive conservation of the same. Also by giving access to third companies to permanently observe the rhythm and connection actions of any user declared as a friend or by the transfer of data from WhatsApp.

The problem is that, in the face of the immense data business or controls or sanctions, they seem dissuasive. With the current law in hand (before the birth of Facebook) the penalties accumulated in Spain since 2016 have cost 1.65 million euros to a company whose value in the stock market yesterday exceeded 450,000 million euros.

The social network rose more than 2% on the stock exchange to half a session yesterday after two weeks in which its price has plummeted by 16%. Another thing is whether the sudden awareness of governments around the world will affect the one that since 2007 has been an example of data monetization for the thriving digital sector. Zuckerberg will have to give explanations next week in the United States Congress and from the United Kingdom, the main base of operations of the company in Europe and where a million users have been affected, the British Government has also asked for explanations. 

The European Commission has considered "unacceptable" that the data of European users of Facebook have been shared without their authorization and in Mexico - with 700,000 stolen data - they ask for guarantees that their next elections in July 2001 will be respected.