The chore of patching Facebook’s colossal security problem is far from over. Just after the company announced it would be suspending 200 apps for misusing personal data, a report from New Scientist reveals that a personality quiz harvested the personal data of three million users.
The app called “myPersonality” was created by University of Cambridge researchers. Six million people completed the quiz, with some opting to share their Facebook data with the app. The data of these users profiles was not only shared with the Cambridge researchers, the data was available to anyone wanting to access it. According to New Scientist, the username and password needed to access the data were available on the code-sharing website GitHub for four years.
Facebook suspended the app on April 7, after it accessed the “Big Five” personality scores of 3.1 million users, and two million status updates from over 150,000 users, including details about age, gender and relationship status from 4.3 million people.
The people behind the data sets were David Stillwell and Michal Kosinski at the University of Cambridge’s The Psychometrics Centre. The man behind the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Alexandr Kogan, was named a collaborator on the myPersonality project until 2014, though "myPersonality" never actually shared any information with Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook itself has allegedly been aware of the whole project since 2011, taking meetings with Kosinski and Stillwell. “It is therefore a little odd that Facebook should suddenly now profess itself to have been unaware of the myPersonality research and to believe that the use of the data was a breach of its terms,” Stillwell told New Scientist.
Though the incident is not as broad as the Cambridge Analytica fiasco that left 50 million users’ data vulnerable, this certainly doesn’t help Facebook’s efforts to save face. The company is reportedly investigating the app to decide if it will take further action, and is also working on tools that will inform users if their data was breached by other third-party apps, such as the case with Cambridge Analytica.
