According to a new report, a former Cambridge Analytica research director claims the number of Facebook users whose data is breached could “absolutely” be more than 87 million.
Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower behind the Facebook data breach tells NBC’s Meet the Press that the real number of user data misused by Cambridge Analytica “could be higher” than the projected number of millions that Facebook has admitted.
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“I think that it could be higher, absolutely,” Wylie said, adding that personal profile information collected from the millions of Facebook users “could be stored in various parts of the world, including Russia.”
Since it was first revealed last month, Facebook has been working damage control hard after it was revealed Cambridge Analytica, a political firm hired by President Trump’s 2016 campaign, acquired access to an abundant amount of user data without permission.
While Facebook has since apologized for the mishandling of data, COO Sheryl Sandberg suggested users would have to “pay to stop their profile data from being shared with advertisers.”
“We don’t have an opt-out at the highest level. That would be a paid product,” Sandberg said in an interview with NBC.
The Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will appear before Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday in two-high profile hearings, with lawmakers expected to ask him questions about Facebook’s ability to protect users and their privacy as the social media giant works hard to eliminate fake news and Russian advertising.
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data leak controversy, Zuckerberg has reportedly lost $10 billion in just one week. The drop in net worth means the social media mogul is only worth a little over $60 million now, which takes him from fifth place to seventh place on billionaire rankings outlined by Forbes.
The Wrap reports Facebook shares dropped 3.3 percent, from $185.09 per share at the close-of-bell on March 16 to $159.45 per share on March 23.
He officially broke his silence over the recent user data privacy issues the site has suffered in a post shared to Facebook, writing, “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t, then we don’t deserve to serve you. I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.”