Facebook has begun to notify users who were affected by the Cambridge Analytica data breach. If you or one of your friends installed the personality-quiz app “This Is Your Digital Life” prior to 2015, then some of your data illicitly made it to the servers of the voter-profiling company.
If your data was ensnared in the breach, you’re not alone. I’m also one of Cambridge Analytica’s victims. (If you’re not sure whether you were affected, you can go to this Facebook page, which will tell you if your information was shared.)
I know I was affected by the breach because I saw a big text box when I opened the Facebook app on my phone this morning. Under a bolded headline reading “Protecting Your Information,” the notice read:
We understand the importance of keeping your data safe.
We have banned the app “This Is Your Digital Life,” which one of your friends used Facebook to log into. We did this because the app may have misused some of your Facebook information by sharing it with a company called Cambridge Analytica. In most cases, the information was limited to public profile, Page likes, birthday, and current city.
You can learn more about what happened and how you can remove apps and websites anytime if you no longer want them to have access to your Facebook information.
There is more work to do, but we are committed to confronting abuse and to putting you in control of your privacy.
Contrary to some media reports, the message did not appear in the app’s “Notification” pane. The notice appeared only once: When I closed the app and reopened it, it disappeared.