Facebook said on Sunday it was conducting a "comprehensive internal and external review" to determine if the personal data of 50 million users that was reported to be misused by a political consultant still existed.
Facebook said on Sunday it was conducting a "comprehensive internal and external review" to determine if the personal data of 50 million users that was reported to be misused by a political consultant still existed.
The company said in a statement that it was trying to determine the accuracy of allegations that a researcher gave the firm Cambridge Analytica inappropriately obtained Facebook user data starting in 2014.
In the statement from Paul Grewal, a Facebook vice president and deputy general counsel, the company said it was committed to "vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people's information."
“The claim that this is a data breach is completely false. Aleksandr Kogan requested and gained access to information from users who chose to sign up to his app, and everyone involved gave their consent. People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked,” the statement reads.
The statement further adds that Facebook is constantly working to improve everyone’s safety and experience. “In the past five years, we have made significant improvements in our ability to detect and prevent violations by app developers. Now all apps requesting detailed user information go through our App Review process, which requires developers to justify the data they’re looking to collect and how they’re going to use it – before they’re allowed to even ask people for it,” it adds.
According to a report by The Verge, the suspension is not permanent. "But the suspended users would need to take unspecified steps to certify that they would comply with Facebook’s terms of service," a spokesperson for Facebook told the online daily.
Last October, Facebook turned over to the U.S. Congress copies of some 3,000 ads that the social network says were bought on Facebook likely by people in Russia in the months before and after the 2016 U.S. election.
With Inputs from Reuters
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