Security News > 2020 > July > Facebook data privacy scandal: A cheat sheet

TechRepublic's cheat sheet about the Facebook data privacy scandal covers the ongoing controversy surrounding the illicit use of profile information.

Fallout from a confluence of factors in the Facebook data privacy scandal has come to bear in the last week of July 2018.

On November 14, 2018, the New York Times published an exposé on the Facebook data privacy scandal, citing interviews of more than 50 people, including current and former Facebook executives and employees.

Because of the way that Facebook synthesizes data in order to attribute collected data to existing profiles, data of people who do not have Facebook accounts congeals into dossiers, which are popularly called a "Shadow profile." It is unclear what other sources of input are added to said "Shadow profiles," a term that Facebook does not use, according to Zuckerberg in his Senate testimony.

Facebook has been proactively notifying users who had their data collected by Cambridge Analytica, though users can manually check to see if their data was shared by going to this Facebook Help page.

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https://www.techrepublic.com/article/facebook-data-privacy-scandal-a-cheat-sheet/#ftag=RSS56d97e7