{"id":4659,"date":"2018-04-10T12:50:33","date_gmt":"2018-04-10T16:50:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/business.financialpost.com\/?p=1572845"},"modified":"2018-04-10T12:50:33","modified_gmt":"2018-04-10T16:50:33","slug":"canadian-facebook-users-concerned-by-notifications-their-data-harvested-by-cambridge-analytica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/2018\/04\/10\/canadian-facebook-users-concerned-by-notifications-their-data-harvested-by-cambridge-analytica\/","title":{"rendered":"Canadian Facebook users concerned by notifications their data harvested by Cambridge Analytica"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Newfoundland and Labrador folk singer Con O\u2019Brien logged onto Facebook Tuesday, and he saw a rather lengthy notification at the top of his newsfeed: he was one of the 87 million people swept up in the Cambridge Analytica data breach.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Now, O\u2019Brien is wondering about the trip he\u2019s got planned.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">\u201cI\u2019m crossing the border next week, going to Florida. And I\u2019m wondering: should I take my phone?\u201d he said. \u201cI think I\u2019ll just tweet nice things about Trump for a few days before I go.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">O\u2019Brien said he wasn\u2019t surprised that his information was part of the Cambridge Analytica database: As the lead singer of the Irish Descendants, he has thousands of fans on Facebook as friends and any one of them could have taken the \u201cThis Is Your Digital Life\u201d quiz, and that would have harvested his Facebook data.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul class=\"related_links\">\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/business.financialpost.com\/technology\/survey-says-canadians-dont-trust-facebook-or-ai\">Canadians\u2019 trust in Facebook was falling before scandal, survey finds<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/business.financialpost.com\/technology\/facebook-testing-new-transparency-tool-in-canada-as-zuckerberg-does-damage-control-before-u-s-congress\">Facebook testing new transparency tool in Canada as Zuckerberg does damage control before U.S. Congress<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/business.financialpost.com\/pmn\/business-pmn\/facebook-ads-apologize-for-cambridge-analytica-scandal\">Facebook ads apologize for Cambridge Analytica scandal<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">All the same, he said it\u2019s concerning. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">\u201cIt\u2019s eerily kinda hitting me what it means,\u201d he said. \u201cIf I ever run for politics sometime, somebody&#8217;s going to have a list of my computer world, for a while, to go back and check on my personal life.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Facebook initially said that it would start notifying users if their data was affected by the privacy breach on Monday, but the notifications did not start appearing at the tops of many people\u2019s newsfeeds until Tuesday morning.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>The social media company has created <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/help\/1873665312923476\"  rel=\"noopener\">a tool <\/a>which allows people to check, if they miss the newsfeed notification.<\/p>\n<p>Facebook says 622,121 Canadians were part of the 87 million people swept up in the Cambridge Analytica database.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">The notifications are part of a crisis PR effort on the part of Facebook ahead of CEO Mark Zuckerberg&#8217;s testimony before the U.S. Congress Tuesday and Wednesday.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Ryan LaFountain, a credit union manager in Roanoke, Virginia, also received the notification Tuesday that he was part of the Cambridge Analytica breach.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">LaFountain said he\u2019s been following the story for the past few weeks, and he is not too impressed with Zuckerberg\u2019s apologies.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">\u201cIt seems as though they\u2019re eager to blame the user,\u201d LaFountain said, adding that he\u2019s heard lots of language about how users didn\u2019t understand the tools and policies in place at Facebook. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">LaFountain said he\u2019s also been feeling some low-key paranoia about life on the Internet recently; he said last week he was texting with co-workers and used an off-colour phrase in one of his messages. A couple days later, the same phrase showed up in an ad.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">\u201cIt was an ad for a coffee mug with this sort of phrase on it,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">\u201cI didn\u2019t use it on Facebook, we didn\u2019t have it in a Facebook chat or anything like that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A lengthy notification at the top of their newsfeed greeted 87 million people this week, 622,121 of them Canadian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4659"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4659"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4687,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4659\/revisions\/4687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}