With the whole Cambridge Analytica and Facebook brouhaha still at the top of everyone’s mind, there is probably one burning question among users of the social network (aside from should they delete their accounts or not?): Am I part of the 84 million accounts that they were able to access through the “This Is Your Digital Life” app? Now Facebook is offering a new tool that will tell you whether or not you or your friends unknowingly shared information with the app and consequently the research group.
The tool is pretty simple and easy to use. All you have to do is click the source link and then it will tell you if you or any of your friends logged into the This Is Your Digital Life and therefore are part of the database that Cambridge Analytica was able to use for their various projects. The thing is that even if you yourself didn’t use the app (which was already removed back in 2015), if any of your friends did access it, there was a huge possibility that they could have still used your data because your friend probably didn’t read the fine print (to be fair, most of us don’t do that).
The tool just answers the question, “Was my information shared?”. If you or your friends didn’t log in to the app, it will just tell you that none of your information was accessed. If one of your friends logged in, it will tell you what information from you was probably shared, like Public Profile, Page likes, date of birth, current city, etc. However, at this point, there’s nothing really you can do about it, except maybe just tighten your privacy settings and be careful which apps you grant access to your Facebook account.
Facebook says they will continue to share their various plans and tools to prevent something like this from happening again. We’ll know in the next few months if there will be a significant drop in Facebook users owing to all these problems and issues cropping up, including Mark Zuckerberg’s very recent foray into a Congress hearing.
SOURCE: Facebook
VIA: SlashGear
