Facebook was aware that Cambridge Analytica was mishandling its users’ data long before both President Trump’s election campaign and the Brexit referendum, an executive at the firm revealed.
Sheryl Sandberg, who has served as Facebook’s COO for the last decade, told NBC’s Today show that the company knew about the data firm harvesting personal information two-and-a-half years ago but did not properly prevent it from being abused.
“We thought it had been deleted because they gave us assurances,” Ms Sandberg said. “But what we didn’t do was the next step of an audit and we’re trying to do that now.
“We could have done this two-and-a-half years ago [but] we thought the data had been deleted and we should have checked.”
How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you
How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you
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1/9 Lock your profile down
If you haven’t done this already, do it now. In Settings, hit the Privacy tab. From here, you can control who gets to see your future posts and friends list. Choose from Public, Friends, Only Me and Custom in the dropdown menu.
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2/9 Limit old posts
Annoyingly, changing this has no effect on who’s able to see your past Facebook posts. Instead, on the Privacy page, you have to click on Limit Past Posts, then select Limit Old Posts and finally hit Confirm on the pop-up.
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3/9 Make yourself harder to find
You can stop completely random people from adding you by selecting Friends of Friends from the dropdown menu in the Who can send you friend requests? section of the Privacy page. It’s also worth limiting who can find your Facebook profile with your number and email address. At the bottom of the page is the option to prevent search engines outside of Facebook from linking to your profile.
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4/9 Control access to your Timeline
You can limit who gets to post things on your Timeline and who gets to see posts on your Timeline too. In Settings, go to Timeline and Tagging and edit the sections you want to lock down.
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5/9 Block people
When you block someone, they won’t be able to see things you post on your Timeline, tag you, invite you to events or groups, start conversations with you or add you as a friend. To do it, go to Settings and Blocking. Annoyingly, you have to block people on Messenger separately. You can also add friends to your Restricted list here, which means they’ll still be friends with you but will only be able to see your public posts and things you share on a mutual friend's Timeline.
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6/9 Review tags
One of Facebook’s handiest privacy features is the ability to review posts you’re tagged in before they appear on your Timeline. They’ll still be visible on the News Feed while they’re fresh, but won’t be tied to your profile forever. In Timeline and Tagging, enable Timeline review controls.
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7/9 Clean up your apps
You can view a list of all of the apps you’ve connected to your Facebook account by going to Settings and Apps. The list might be longer than you expected it to be. It’s worth tidying this up to ensure things you no longer use lose access to your personal information. If you don’t want to log into websites and apps with your facebook account, scroll down and turn Platform off.
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8/9 Change your ad preferences
You can view a list of everything Facebook thinks you’re into and tinker with your ad preferences by going to Settings and Adverts. A lot more information is displayed on the desktop site than the app, so we’d recommend doing this on a computer.
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9/9 Download your data
Facebook lets you download all of the data it has on you, including the posts you’ve shared, your messages and photos, ads you’ve clicked on and even the IP addresses that are logged when you log in or out of the site. It’s a hell of a lot of information, which you should download to ensure you never over-share on the social network again.
Data gathered by Cambridge Analytica was used to target Facebook users with political propaganda during both the 2016 US presidential elections and the UK’s referendum to leave the EU that same year.
Facebook revealed this week that the data of up to 87 million of its users was exploited, while more than half of its 2.2 billion users have had their personal information compromised by “malicious actors” at some point.
It was also revealed this week that Facebook planned to collect medical data from patients in US hospitals as part of a proposed research project.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to appear before Congress next week to face questions surrounding consumer data.
Ms Sandberg said during her interview that the only way Facebook could offer its users an option to opt out of data-based advertising would be if the user paid for it, though no such subscription-type model currently exists.
“We have different forms of opt out,” she said. “We don’t have an opt out at the highest level, that would be a paid product.”
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- Cambridge Analytica
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