In March it was revealed how a personality quiz on Facebook with the name thisisyourdigitallife managed to access and then sell data of over 50m users of Facebook to political consultancy. Now it appears that a second personality quiz app may have done same.
Huge new Facebook data leak exposed intimate details of 3m users
Facebook has managed to distract users from Cambridge Analytica scandal and win investors through differently looking but exactly same privacy policy, the company has the massive task of investigating all apps which had access to data of a large number of users to make sure that they do not misuse the access to such information.
A report by New Scientist reveals another affected part of data containing information about 3 million users which were “left exposed online for everyone to access” for over four years. The report said that academics at the University of Cambridge distributed data from personality quiz app named myPersonality to hundreds of researchers via the website with insufficient security measures.
More than 6 million people completed the tests on the myPersonality app and nearly half agreed to share data from their Facebook profiles with the project. All of this data was then scooped up and the names removed before it was put on a website to share with other researchers. The terms allow the myPersonality team to use and distribute the data “in an anonymous manner such that the information cannot be traced back to the individual user”.
More than 280 peoples from nearly 150 institutions gained access to full data set by registering as a collaborator of the project. The researchers at universities to people at companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo had fun with your data and all answers entered in the quiz as well.
Facebook says it is investigating the app and if they “myPersonality” refuses to co-operate or fail in audit it will be banned.
