Facebook is trying hard to tackle its largest data leakage or breach of over 50 million users for the alleged political purposes. On this behalf, the co-owner of the Whatsapp, Brian Acton is asking the users to delete Facebook. Brian made this shocking statement as a tweet on his Twitter account. “It is time. #deletefacebook.” This is the tweet appeared on his account.
It is time. #deletefacebook
— Brian Acton (@brianacton) 20 March 2018
Facebook had procured the instant messaging platform, Whatsapp the year 2014 for an amount of $16 billion. Brian was the co-owner of WhatsApp from where he quit earlier in this year only to start his own foundation which is named as the Signal Foundation. Now the leftover co-founder Jan Koum is the leading the WhatsApp company.
Facebook has been put under observation since last week as a news about a data leakage has come to the limelight. The news was regarding Cambridge Analytica which is a political data analysis company, that has accessed the data of over 50 million users from the social media platform, Facebook, without their knowledge or consent.
It is well known that the Cambridge Analytica is mainly funded by Robert Mercer, a Donald Trump supporter. It was Robert who donated the money to Trump’s election campaign.
It is assumed that the analytical data company will be making use of this data to aim at the political advertisements on Facebook based on the user’s like and interests. The data is accessed by the Cambridge Analytica with the help of the creator of a quiz. This quiz has been taken by more than 2,70,000 Facebook users. The data which was accessed by the quiz creator was then passed to the Cambridge Analytica company against Facebook’s policy.
This is pointing towards the major loophole in the Facebook API which allows the third party developer to access the data from the Facebook users as well as the friends of these users. It’s a major thing to be noted that the user’s friends on the social media platform who are innocent and not participated in the quiz are also harmed by this. The Facebook policy is stating, “none of the data can be marketed or sold” was violated by the Cambridge Analytica.
It’s much disturbing that even after knowing the data leakage back in 2015, Facebook didn’t publicize the information. Now it is emerging that, the private info of millions and millions of the Facebook users could have been accessed similarly by other companies who broke the same terms and conditions.
According to the reports, the “lax approach” of Facebook towards the protected data that poses serious risks of a data breach was previously warned by the ex- platform operations manager of Facebook, Mr. Sandy Parakilas, who was in charge of the policing data breaches by the third party software developers between 2011 and 2012. He also blamed that Facebook didn’t use its enforcement mechanism or audit the external developers to make sure that the data of the users will not be misused.
He is also claiming that Facebook will not have any control over the data of the user’s once it is left to the Facebook servers and there is actually no insight into what is going on. He added that it was better for the Facebook, not to know what happened to the data as it could have a stronger legal position if it didn’t know about the abuse happened with the data.
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