Facebook Admits "Most" Of Its 2.2 Billion Users Exposed To Data Scraping, "Malicious Actors"

Facebook has admitted that "most" of its 2.2 billion users "could have had their public profile scraped" by third parties without their knowledge, and that the personal information of up to 87 million people was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, the company disclosed on Wednesday.

“In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people — mostly in the US — may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica,” said Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's Chief Technology Officer.

Initial reports set the number of users affected by the CA data purchase at 50 million. The London-based political data company bought the data from two psychologists (one of whom currently works for Facebook) who developed a data harvesting app disguised as a fitness app.

One of the methods used by "malicious actors" to "scrape" user data has been to enter another person's phone number or email address into a Facebook search, allowing information to be harvested or scraped. “We believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way,” Schroepfer said.

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