Ever since reports from the Guardian and New York Times have revealed how Cambridge Analytica violated Facebook rules and used personal information of over 50 million people to create their psychological profiles. This allowed Trump’s team to target people depending on their temperament.
But, how did Cambridge Analytica get their hands on the data? Cambridge Analytica took the help of Aleksandr Kogan who developed an app for educational purposes which allowed it to capture a user’s information and even that of their friends. This was possible only after a Facebook user explicitly gave Kogan’s app the permission to do so. Even then, Kogan was to use this data for research purposes and he was not allowed to share it with a third-party. Kogan, however, passed this data to Cambridge Analytica which allowed it to create psychological profiles of over 50 million U.S. voters thereby allowing them to manipulate their votes.
Facebook was never really known for its privacy-friendly approach but this data breach will definitely make a lot of people sit up and take note of what all apps have access to their data on the social network. Given how Facebook can be used to log into various websites and how so many apps keep asking for permissions to access data of your Facebook profile, there’s a lot of data at stake here. Plenty of popular iPhone apps also make use of Facebook login to offer users a convenient and quick way of quickly logging into their services. Considering the situation though, its time you went through the apps that have access to your Facebook profile’s data and remove the unnecessary ones. Here’s how.
Step 1: Head over to Facebook.com on your PC. On the top-right side, click the downward facing arrow followed by Settings from the menu that opens. From the left pane, click on Apps.
Step 2: You will now be shown the different apps into which you have logged in to using Facebook. If you want more information about the data that you provide to an app, you can click on its name.
Otherwise, simply hover your mouse over its name and tap the ‘X’ icon and then confirm your selection by pressing Remove in the dialog box that opens. This will stop that app from having further access to your Facebook profile data. However, there’s not much you can do about the data that was previously already shared with them.
Chances are the list is going to be a particularly long one. And you won’t probably remember giving access to half the apps to your Facebook profile data. Don’t be intimated by the size of the list though. Just go through it and remove all and any apps that you no longer use or don’t remember sharing your Facebook data with.
