Facebook starts alerting users if their data was shared with Cambridge Analytica; Here is how you can check

Facebook is notifying users whether their data was shared with Cambridge Analytica or not with a news-feed alert. Apart from that there is a manual process to check it too.

Cambridge Analytica, a London-based data analytics firm, was accused of harvesting private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission.

New Delhi: After being at the centre of a firestorm over data-breach scandal, Facebook has now begun alerting some users that their data was swept up in the Cambridge Analytica row. According to reports, Facebook is sending out notifications to the users in Facebook news feed informing whether their data was exposed to the now-banned app “This Is Your Digital Life”. The notification says that “one of your friends" used Facebook to log into “This Is Your Digital Life”, which is a personality quiz. The process of notifying people began this week and it tells users whether they had ever logged in to the "This Is Your Digital Life" app, which has been linked to the exposure of tens of millions of records for political research, people have been sharing the news of whether their data was put at risk. The notice says that the app misused the information, including public profile, pages like, birthday and current city by sharing the details with the political data-mining British firm Cambridge Analytica. Facebook had earlier announced that 87 million users, whose data might have been exposed to Cambridge Analytica, would be getting a detailed message on their news feed starting Monday. Of the 87 million users who data have been swept up, 5 lakh users are from India. The notifications started popping in the newsfeed of people hours before the senate hearing of Mark Zuckerberg started. Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie previously estimated that more than 50 million people’s data might have been swooped up by the personality quiz that collected the data of users and their friends. This is how to check whether your data was exposed or not: In case you have not received any notification from Face book, you can use the following steps to find out whether your data was exposed or not. You can manually check your account’s data status on a new help page created on the site. You’re able to manually check your account’s status on a new help page on the site. Log in to Facebook help centre. You can search “How can I tell if my info was shared with Cambridge Analytica?” Here you will see one of these results. In case your data was not picked up, you will see a message that reads “Based on our available records, neither you nor your friends logged into ‘This Is Your Digital Life’. As a result it doesn’t appear your Facebook information was shared with Cambridge Analytica by ‘This Is Your Digital Life.’ Screenshot of the message in case information was not shared with cambridge Analytica In case your information was exposed to Cambridge Analytica, you will see a message in which it is wtitten  “A friend of yours did log in.” In this case it is probable that your eprsonal data might have been shared wiuth Cambridge Analytica. To those who installed the app directly, a different message stating “If you see this message, you were probably responsible for your and your friends’ data being handed over to Cambridge Analytica. If you used the app, this result also means your psychometric test results may have helped inform Cambridge Analytica’s strategy during the US Election Campaign”