Cambridge Analytica: Facebook to contact 87 million users affected by data breach

Up to 87 million Facebook users who may have had their data shared with Cambridge Analytica will be informed through the social network this week.

Facebook says that from today, affected users will receive detailed messages on their news feeds.

All 2.2 billion of the site’s account holders will also be sent a notification on how to protect their personal information, with a link to see what data has been shared with the apps they use, reports The Daily Telegraph.

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More than a million users in the UK may have had their data harvested by Cambridge Analytica. However, most of the affected account holders - about 70 million - are in the US.

The London-based political consulting firm worked for Donald Trump’s campaign team in the 2016 US presidential election and used the data to build a software program to predict and try to influence votes. The information was gathered through an app that paid users to take a personality test but that also harvested details about their Facebook friends.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, due to testify before the US Congress next week, has admitted to making a “huge mistake” in failing to recognise how the social network service could be misused.

“I think life is about learning from the mistakes and figuring out what you need to do to move forward,” he said during a press briefing last week. “The reality of a lot of this is, when you’re building something like Facebook that is unprecedented in the world, there are going to be things that you mess up.”

Zuckerberg insists that he remains the best person to lead Facebook.