Here’s the Data Facebook Has on Users and How the Company Gathers It

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A 3-D image of a keyboard with social media icons, including Facebook. Commons image by Flickr user Animated Heaven

By Sam Harnett, KQED News/The California Report

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in apology mode over how Facebook profile data was used in the 2016 election. Wednesday night on CNN, Zuckerberg said the company was not on top of data security like it should have been.

Here’s what happened. Facebook has tons and tons of apps on it made by third-party developers — games, quizzes, etc. One of these third-party developers made a little personality quiz app. About 270,000 Facebook users took the quiz, and in doing so, allowed the app to download their personal data. This is common with third-party apps on Facebook. You check a box, they get your data. At the time, third-party apps could also access not only your data but also all your friends’ data. So, presto, the data collected by the maker of this little quiz quickly ballooned from 270,000 profiles to reportedly around 50 million.

Read the complete story at KQED News/The California Report.

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