Here’s how Facebook wants to prevent future data breaches
San Francisco : From taking action on potential past abuse to putting stronger protections in place to prevent future abuse, Facebook has said it has chalked out a roadmap for its “future” after being rocked by a data breach scandal.
“What happened with Cambridge Analytica was a breach of the trust people place in Facebook to protect their data when they share it. As (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg explained in his post, we are announcing some important steps for the ‘future’ of our platform,” the company said in a statement late on Wednesday.
London-based Cambridge Analytica has allegedly been using Facebook users’ data to unfairly influence election results by psychological manipulation, entrapment techniques and fake news campaigns.
As Facebook got mired into its biggest-ever controversy, Zuckerberg on Wednesday admitted that the social media giant “made mistakes” over the scandal and a “breach of trust” had occurred between it and its users.
Laying special emphasis on reviewing the platform, the company said: “We will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform in 2014 to reduce data access and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity.”
Users affected by apps that have misused their data will be informed.
“This includes building a way for people to know if their data might have been accessed via ‘thisisyourdigitallife’. Moving forward, if we remove an app for misusing data, we will tell everyone who used it,” Facebook said.
Other steps to prevent potential future data breaches included turning off access for unused apps, restricting Facebook login data and encouraging users to manage the apps they use.
The social media giant is also mulling to reward people who find vulnerabilities by expanding its “bug bounty programme”.
The social media platform is facing a major backlash after reports emerged that political data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica accessed the data of its 50 million users without their permission.
The company is currently being probed in the US and Britain.
IANS
