By Bryan Castro ‘19

When you think about Facebook, you think about posting pictures, watching videos, and sending messages. But one question no one seems to be asking is “How secure is our data?” Over the past weeks Facebook has been undergoing investigation due to data breach and the way the data was used. The compiled data of 87 million users, most of them from the United States, was gathered by Cambridge Analytica, which is being said to have helped elect President Donald Trump.

This allowed Facebook to target specific political ads to those whose information was gathered, which was consider a possible outcome of the election. This led to users canceling their Facebook accounts worried that more of their information would be gathered and used for the wrong reasons.

Not only did this question the political election in November 2016, but also makes users wonder, “What other information is Facebook able to collect?”

Following the removal of some user accounts, they discovered that Facebook has access to users phone logs, text messages and browser history. With this information, Facebook was able to target explicit ads to the majority of its user.

“We clearly stated that the users were granting us the right to use the data in broad scope, including selling and licensing the data,” said Aleksandr Kogan, Cambridge Analytica founder. Facebook essentially allowed outside developers to gather users data in which that solely developer could’ve sold that data.

Cambridge Analytica closed its doors in May, after the scandal.