The global social media giant Facebook, is under the scanner once again over privacy related concerns.
In recent months, Facebook have been caught up with a number of privacy scandals and data protection issues including the infamous Cambridge Analytica data breach issue.
The link with the earlier data scandal is the University of Cambridge’s Psychometrics Center controlled both data sets. Alexander Kogan, who is a core component of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, was part of this project as well.
However, there seem to be a no end to the Facebook privacy scandals.
A data set of more than 3 million users have been exposed via a personality quiz app called myPersonality. The app, myPersonality was developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge. The quiz was taken by over 6 million people. The data included answers to personal questions and was held by academics from the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre. The personality quiz exposed the personal Facebook details and even status updates of around 150,000 users.
This data was supposed to be restricted to a group of selected people with official approvals, it was reportedly made available to a select group of researchers outside of Cambridge as well.
The app accessed the Big Five, personality app recorded personality scores of 3.1 million users and status updates from over 150,000 users, including details about age, gender and relationship status from 4.3 million people. Ever since the news of this scandal came to light, Facebook suspended the myPersonality app!
Facebook’s response to this led to an investigation into the myPersonality quiz and the associated apps. The social media giant has so far suspended 200 apps that could be involved in data harvesting in this manner.
With the privacy issues continuing to woe us, is the social media giant Facebook secure enough to use?
