Facebook scandal: 87 million users' data shared
‘it was people’s responsibility to decide how to use FB tools’: Zuckerberg
San Francisco: Facebook believes the data of up to 87 million people was improperly shared with the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica -- many more than previously disclosed.
The BBC has been told that about 1.1 million of them are UK-based.
The overall figure had been previously quoted as being 50 million by the whistleblower Christopher Wylie, BBC reported on Wednesday.
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg said "clearly we should have done more, and we will be going forward".
During a press conference he said that he had previously assumed that if Facebook gave people tools, it was largely their responsibility to decide how to use them.
But he added that it was "wrong in retrospect" to have had such a limited view.
"Today, given what we know... I think we understand that we need to take a broader view of our responsibility, that we're not just building tools, but that we need to take full responsibility for the outcomes of how people use those tools as well," he said.
Zuckerberg also announced an internal audit had uncovered a fresh problem. Malicious actors had been abusing a feature that let users search for one another by typing in email addresses or phone numbers into Facebook's search box.
As a result, many people's public profile information had been "scraped" and matched to the contact details, which had been obtained from elsewhere.
"It is reasonable to expect that if you had that (default) setting turned on, that in the last several years someone has probably accessed your public information in this way," Zuckerberg said.
The estimates of how many people's data had been exposed were revealed in a blog by the tech firm's chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer.
BBC has also learned that Facebook now estimates that about 305,000 people had installed the This Is Your Digital Life quiz that had made the data-harvesting possible. The previously suggested figure had been 270,000.
About 97 per cent of the installations occurred within the US. However, just over 16 million of the total number of users affected are thought to be from other countries.
Facebook has faced intense criticism after it emerged that it had known for years that Cambridge Analytica had collected data from millions of its users, but had relied on the London-based firm to self-certify that it had deleted the information.
Cambridge Analytica said it had bought the information from the creator of the This Is Your Digital Life app without knowing that it had been obtained improperly.
During Zuckerberg's press conference, Cambridge Analytica tweeted it had only obtained data for 30 million individuals -- not 87 million -- from the app's creator, and again insisted it had deleted all records.
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Indigo flights chaos: SCR to run special trains to clear passenger rush
Hyderabad (PTI): The South Central Railway on Saturday announced that it would run four special trains to manage the surge in passengers resulting from the large-scale cancellation of IndiGo flights here.
The move comes as flyers face significant disruption and long queues at the airport due to the cancellation.
A press release from the SCR said it is running the special trains to clear the extra rush of passengers to Chennai, Mumbai and Shalimar (Kolkata) from Hyderabad today.
Meanwhile, as many as 43 outbound Indigo flights were cancelled from here on Saturday, Rajiv Gandhi International Airport sources said.
ALSO READ: IndiGo cancels over 200 flights from Delhi, Mumbai on Saturday
Similarly, 26 incoming flights are also likely to be cancelled during the day, they said.
The flight cancellations drew ire from passengers, who thronged the IndiGo counters at the airport demanding to know the exact situation.
“This is utter nonsense! Digiyatra done, message received that departure has been rescheduled ahead of the scheduled departure and now upon arriving at Hyderabad airport coming to know at the security checkpoint that Indigo flight is cancelled,” Tarun Singha, former Ministry of Defence spokesperson said in a post on X.
“But the thing is if you don’t shout they do nothing. Example at Hyderabad Airport, there was no staff no flight information for an hour. Then a fellow passenger started shouting on mic and an Indigo staff appeared finally,” a netizen said in a post.
On Friday, when IndiGo cancelled over 1,000 flights from across airports, its CEO Pieter Elbers apologised in a video message for the major inconvenience caused to passengers due to the disruptions.
In the one-way video communication, Elbers also said that the airline was expecting fewer than 1,000 flights on Saturday.
