The former Cambridge Analytica employee said that “a lot of people” had access to the data and referenced a “genuine risk” that the harvested data could be stored in Russia.
“It could be stored in various parts of the world, including Russia, given the fact that the professor who was managing the data harvesting process was going back and forth between the UK and to Russia,”

over 87 million FB users could have had their personal data affected...... that breaks down to about 40% chance (conservative estimate) of your FB data compromised.

I've always tried to be quite circumspect about what I sign up for and never bothered with Facebook, Twitter or any of the similar sites. I've been banging on for years that most of these services are only there to harvest information for marketing and guess things are coming home to roost. I feel quite smug in being able to say "I told you so..." Equally, l've never understood the need for sharing every aspect of ones life with the world at large. Maybe I'm just old! Having said that, I'm under no illusions and pretty sure ALL the power that be around the world can access any piece of information about me they may want.

About 3 years ago i had a FB account but deleted it as really didn't find much use for it

Oh dear, you're screwed and the Russians know everything including your inside leg measurement now!

no they got that information from the hack of my yahoo account along with millions of others - and if you were not a member of yahoo then they got it from the Equifax breach .....no one's information is safe anymore and if anyone think's it is - they're just fooling themselves

+1

If you're on FB your data is likely sitting in servers 1km away from me
I've always said FB was spying on it's members, so I've never used it ( google is no better too).

"Good morning, Mr. Immermann. Your mission, should you decide to accept it..."

My mission is to control myself for not say "I told you so" to hundreds of people as I have been dissing FB and it's lack of privacy and security protection for MANY years.

I think I am going to completely "re-invent" myself as far as the internet is concerned and, the new me will do everything via VPN.

While I still can...

Just wait until national governments get rid of cash and ALL financial transactions will have a digital record and trail.


Then the real fun begins.

I don't have enough facepalm for people who are just now concerned about privacy on the Internet.

Spoiler: User data has been a commodity from the first cookie delivered and the first sign up to the first website. Anything and everything a site or service can gather about a user and find a way to monetize it will monetize, and it's been that way since the beginning.

Yep.


Facebook users have been only fractionally more "invaded" than anyone else that uses the internet for other reasons, posting on forums for example.

Agreed, there’s nothing really new here other than the format finally being familiar to people previously oblivious. Browsers have had similar practices for decades. People are going to get a lesson in how apps work, it isn’t “magic” and it can be abused.
Like the false news articles and those that believe the obscure sources without thinking. To most of us here, we learned the rules of internet survival years ago.
rule#1: assume everyone is a dude
rule #2: don’t believe it just because you read it on the internet.
rule#3: don’t post anything you wouldn’t want everyone to know. Once it’s online, it isn’t private ever again.
rule #4: just because you don’t know how your info can be obtained and used against you doesn’t mean it can’t happen anyway.

One more time....

Privacy Badger

I love it.

Those things are good, but not supported on all browsers. Also most use apps instead of facebook in their browser. I still prefer using browsers so you have a chance. Apps get permissions right from the users to do what they want, on your phone in particular. That’s where the fb messenger problem comes in. The more you unify your messages into one place, texts, fb messanger etc, the more access you have to give the app so it can do what it claims and that the user said they wanted by allowing it.
Security is always a balancing act between convenience and being safe. The fb messenger on android fiasco went waaay too far into the convenient side. LOL

The other issue I have encountered is that an individual can be extremely careful in their own actions, which I think I generally am, but can still fall victim to the activities of others. Some examples:

Four or five years ago now, my wife and I each had a couple of email addresses that we only used for communication between ourselves for those occasions either of us were working away from home for any time and never shared these addresses with anyone else. One day my wife took her laptop to work to catch up on some personal study during her breaks; she doesn't need to use the same laptop in her day to day work. During one of her breaks a colleague was chatting to her about FB and established she wasn't signed up. My wife left the machine unattended for a few minutes and failed to lock the machine because she thought to be gone for a couple of minutes only. In that time her colleague signed her up to FB! Notwithstanding the actions of her colleague, within minutes every email address my wife had ever used to mail me and stored on that laptop, including the private address never shared with anyone else, were bombarded by FB invites to signup. I can only conclude from this that FB must have trawled through my wife's laptop and effectively spammed each and every mail address found. What else did it steal???

Once I was working on a project that employed a lot of temporary admin contractors. I was a lot younger, definitely naïve and single at the time, and admit to enjoying cheeky banter with all the women on the team that today I can see how it could have been misconstrued as light-hearted flirting. One Sunday morning the doorbell rang, I opened the front door to find a young woman from the admin team on the doorstep loaded with baking trays and ingredients. She'd decided because I was a single man I would need a woman to come and cook me a Sunday roast! It transpires she'd got my home address from the emergency contact register in the office. I had no romantic interest in this women, in fact I quite enjoyed being single at the time and, being extremely embarrassed by the incident, sought an older colleague's advice. He took the matter into his own hands and reported the data breach. I felt quite guilty after because the same woman was dismissed on the spot as a result and I may have inadvertently created the situation, but I suffered even longer as the butt of the joke from my mates!

Many years later, the nature of my work means I generally have to create specific email addresses for the various projects I am engaged and lost track of the number I have had to discard because another individual was too f...ing stupid not to click on a link in an obvious unsolicited phishing email. In all cases, these were professional and highly intelligent individuals, (one of the culprit was even the project IT Security consultant!) and the address has ended up on a spammers list and been swamped with so much spam to become unusable.

Now I realise that little or none of my personal data was captured in the incidents above, but it does demonstrate that even the most vigilant are still vulnerable to the actions of others; whether those others be a corporate entity, an individual using privileged information for personal reasons or working with some pretty stupid "professionals". OK, may be the last one is just me!



Thanks Nixer, not heard of this one, (must have missed your previous mentions ), and will check it out.

I use Privacy Badger and laugh at how many alerts it gives me when I'm on SimHQ forums. Right now it has 13!

So what is really the big scandal with Cambridge and FB? I'm trying to really understand it. I think the biggest obstacle to me is that,well, it's Facebook, so why would you share sensitive information up there anyway? I don't put my address, phone number, or any pother info like that up there. I don't use it to ran or anything, but more for a recreational use. I'm not sure what Cambridge or anyone else can use with that kind of data. Maybe send me spam and ads, but that's up to me whether I fall for it or not, right?

So what really is the big concern? Just trying to truly understand.

v6,
boNes

PS I get so amused thinking about "Minority Report" when Tom Cruise walks into the mall and gets bombarded with all those ads when they scan him. How true today!

I'd trust a Nigerian Prince with my personal data over Facebook or the Russians.

What it is worse, that that information is in Russian's or NSA's hands?

I would say that anything you put on social media is basically public even if it is set to private.

Also, dont think your emails are safe either. The US government sued and shut down the only truly private email (lavabit). So dont expect anything you say in a private email to be truly private either.