Know how to check if your data was shared with Cambridge Analytica

Facebook has recently started the process of alerting around 87 million users whose data was accessed by the election consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

The social media platform eventually hopes to notify each and every user who was affected with a warning at the top of their news feed. For now, users can check by going to a new help page on the website or searching “How can I tell if my info was shared with Cambridge Analytica?” in Facebook’s help centre.

Users will be able to see a message saying that “neither you nor your friends logged into ‘This Is Your Digital Life, the personality quiz that Cambridge Analytica used for gathering its data.

Approximately 87 million users, including more than 1 million users in the UK, will be getting a different response saying “a friend of yours did log in”. This means that their profile, birthday, current city as well as page likes were likely shared with the company, & possibly their news feed content at the time.

Approximately 300,000 users – including 53 Australian users, 10 users in New Zealand, as well as an unknown number of users in the United Kingdom – will get a message that they have installed the ‘This Is Your Digital Life’ app. This means that they have certainly handed over the personal data of all their friends on Facebook at the time, and formed part of the core group for the psychometric profiling that Cambridge Analytica carried out during the US election campaign.

Facebook has also promised changes to its platform in order to prevent this sort of “abuse”. “These actions would prevent any app like [This Is Your Digital Life] from being able to access so much data today,” the company said.