5.6 lakh IndianFB users hit by data breach after they installed quiz app “this is your digital life”
New Delhi: Private data of over 5.6 lakh Indian Facebook users was compromised by a private marketing firm that later sold the personal details acquired through a quiz app to Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based company at the centre of a global privacy breach storm.
The social media giant informed the Indian government on Thursday about the details of compromised accounts in response to a notice over the user data breach and details of the steps Facebook was taking to ensure safety and prevent misuse of personal data.
A Facebook spokesperson, sharing the response with IANS, said a possible breach of data of 562,455 users happened after 335 Facebook users in India installed a quiz app, "thisisyourdigitallife" between November 2013 and December 2015.
The app, developed by University of Cambridge psychology researcher Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research, pulled out data of not only these 335 users but their friends as well as friends of friends also.
Some 335 people in India were said to have installed the app, which is 0.1 per cent of its total worldwide installs. But this information is limited to people who installed the app throughout its lifetime on the Facebook platform -- from 2013 to December 2015 -- when it was suspended from the platform.
The social media giant, however, did not reveal the identity or locations of these 335 users.
From Monday, Facebook will inform all 562,455 users that their account privacy had been breached through a link at the top of their news feed so they can see what apps they use and the information they have shared with those apps.
Facebook also doesn't know how Cambridge Analytica and Global Science Research used the data of Indian users because the firms are not its downstream affiliates and may have made independent decisions regarding the data they obtained. This, Facebook said, was "not authorize(d) and breached our policies".
Ankush Johar, Director at Infosec Ventures -- security solutions firm – said, "The quiz app 'thisisyourdigitallife' is not the only application that had hidden data-scraping functionalities and many other apps were exploiting these so-called 'features' provided by Facebook which the company confirmed itself.
"If as small as 350 users in a single app can lead to leakage of over 5 lakh users, the true number can be exponentially bigger than this," Johar added.
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SC criticizes UP govt services commission for questions with ambiguous set of answers
New Delhi: The Supreme Court has slammed the Uttar Pradesh Subordinate Services Selection Commission (UPSSSC) for having set certain questions with ambiguous choices as answers for the Revenue Lekhpal examination for 2021-2022 and has directed the Commission to re-evaluate the answer sheets.
The bench consisting of Justices Sudhanshu Dhulia and K Vinod Chandran has also said that the ambiguity in the answers has affected the outcome for over 8,000 candidates who had competed for 8,085 vacancies, reports LiveLaw.
The judges further resolved the ambiguities in three major questions from Booklet Series B.
The question on the location from where Mahatma Gandhi started the Salt Satyagraha gave options of Dandi, Surat, Sabarmati and Pawnar. The bench pointed out that the site of violation of the salt law was Dandi from a purely technical point of view. The official position in considering it the right answer was correct. The judges added that the Satyagraha commenced from Sabarmati, and therefore could also be considered as correct although not technically so. They said that the candidates who opt for either of the above answers should be given full marks.
The bench also gave directions related to the longest national highway in Uttar Pradesh, stating that, as the numbers had changed with time, two answers could be considered correct. Thirdly, it referred to the eligibility of farmers to get subsidy under the solar photovoltaic irrigation pump scheme and clarified that two answers were correct due to the changes in the policy implemented by the government.
The judges chastised the UPSSSC for the ambiguous and unclear questions it had set and stressed that the lapses proved to be highly disadvantageous for the candidates. They also directed the Commission to award appropriate marks to the affected candidates while protecting those who had been selected, to avoid disruption in the recruitment process.
