A Trump-affiliated data company stole 50 million Facebook profiles — here's how to protect your account (FB)

Mark Zuckerberg

Lots of software developers and apps may have access to your Facebook data that you don't remember granting.

If you're worried about your digital privacy, now is a good time to check up on your "Facebook Platform" settings, which is the tool that Trump-affiliated data firm Cambridge Analytica used to illicitly obtain personal, private data from 50 million Facebook users.

They got this data from Facebook itself. The Guardian reported that the data was collected through an app called "thisisyourdigitallife," built by a Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge academic.

Facebook says that everyone whose data are in the Cambridge Analytica set "knowingly provided their information."

"Aleksandr Kogan requested and gained access to information from users who chose to sign up to his app, and everyone involved gave their consent," Facebook's Paul Grewal, a deputy general counsel, wrote. "People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked."

It turns out that before 2014, Facebook used to let app developers obtain data from users and their connections when they used Facebook to log into an app.

This is exceedingly common — I checked my own Facebook account and realized that I had given over 200 apps access to my personal data.

Here's how to do your own checkup.

I had allowed way more apps to access my Facebook data than I initially expected — 231 apps in total.

This link will take you directly to your installed applications.

Even worse, I was letting apps my Facebook friends installed take some of my Facebook data, too, including my current city, and my likes.

While some of the apps I connected to Facebook were legitimate services, like Spotify or Airbnb, a lot of them were dumb one-off quizzes I took years ago. For example, this quiz about a 2009 Miley Cyrus hit.

This app could access my friends list, my status updates, my birthday, photos, and lots of other personal data. Luckily there was a button at the bottom to revoke access.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider