Recent Data Breaches in Facebook

This article discusses the recent data breaches in Facebook, focusing on the case of Cambridge Analytica. It explores the methods used to accomplish the breaches and the impact on user privacy. The article also suggests measures that could have been taken to prevent these breaches.

Running head: RECENT DATA BREACHES IN FACEBOOK
RECENT DATA BREACHES IN FACEBOOK
Name of the Student
Name of the university
Author note

1RECENT DATA BREACHES IN FACEBOOK
Table of Contents
Introduction...........................................................................................................................2
Discussion...............................................................................................................................3
The case of Cambridge Analytica studied in details..........................................3
The method appointed to accomplish the data breach....................................4
Agreements of Facebook related to data breach................................................8
Conclusion..............................................................................................................................9
References...........................................................................................................................11
Appendix...............................................................................................................................15

2RECENT DATA BREACHES IN FACEBOOK
Introduction
Facebook is being used extensively by the end-users to share a wide
range of informations but the data privacy breaches that have been
affecting Facebook are of great concern. As per the research done by
Goodwin et al. (2016), Facebook is affecting user’s privacy and serious
defects in the system of the company have been detected. The privacy of
the Facebook user’s data has been undermined and the three primary
factors for this are; users have got habituated to post anything and
everything on social media, Facebook is not taking required steps to
protect the privacy of data of the users and the third parties are making
use of this information according to their benefits. As per the research
done by Shulman, Sharma and Cosley (2016), Facebook has acquired its
position in the sphere of social networking sites by proving to be the
global website with the number of users crossing the 8 million mark. The
informations are easily available and aggregated under one platform that
makes the task of the data hackers easy and the information vulnerable to
data breaches. The figure provided in appendix 1 is associated with
showing the statistics of the data of those people who were a victim to the
data breach. The third party can develop a database based on the data
obtained from Facebook and can misuse the data, steal confidential such
as passwords or even the entire databases. It has been in the media for
the data breaches that has been affecting it since the year 2016. As per
the research done by Spiekermann et al. (2015), the recent data breach in
Facebook was done by Cambridge Analytica, a political data analysis firm
that was working on the election campaign of President Trump.
The data breaches are certainly the fault of the company but the
users who are actively sharing their information are also to be blamed for
this. It is the trust that Facebook has been able to create successfully that
though being amidst disputes still has got a huge fan base and millions
accounts to its name. As per the research done by Manworren, Letwat and
Daily (2016), the Cambridge Analytica scandal is in the news now-a-days
and the social networking giant is struggling to gain back the trust of
millions of its users because this has been the biggest scandal till date. As

3RECENT DATA BREACHES IN FACEBOOK
per the research done by Martin, Bora and Palmatier (2017), critics are of
the opinion how could a giant platform like Facebook be unaware of the
way its user’s data was being illegally used for the campaign purpose. It
highly failed to provide security to its users. In order to analyze and find
out those who are at fault in the data breaches, there has to be detail in-
depth knowledge of the scenario in the same. As per the research done by
Thomas et al. (2017), not just Cambridge Analytica, in the year 2018,
Facebook came into limelight when it declared that approximately 90
million of the users of the app have had their informations exposed to
cyber criminals following a breach in the applications feature named
“View As” that enables the users to take a view of their Facebook account
as if they were a different user. As per the research done by Edwards,
Hofmeyr and Forrest (2016), the company’s official blog read on Tuesday,
September 25 that they have detected vulnerability in their codes and this
has been a part of the code for the last one year. The loophole provided
the hackers accessibility to the accounts and thus users login tokens
especially the digital keys which normally permit the people to remain
logged in all the time were mishandled.
Discussion
The case of Cambridge Analytica studied in details
Facebook is amidst a dispute in relation to leak of personal
information and confidential data of the users. As per the research done
by Cadwalladr and Graham-Harrison, (2018), the dispute is serious
enough and roused various questions including whether these
informations have been used in order to influence the presidential
elections results and the vote Brexit in U.S in the year 2016. As per the
research done by Isaak and Hanna (2018), the company has been banned
by Facebook from any further collecting of the data but the loss is huge as
near about more than 50 million accounts were used in this scandal. As
per the research done by Common et al. (2018), the senior executive of
Cambridge Analytica were held live on media by Britain’s Channel 4 News

4RECENT DATA BREACHES IN FACEBOOK
when they were making opinions to use the collected Facebook data to
help the different candidates in the presidential elections and for this the
medium to be adopted were the sex workers and misinformation.
The method appointed to accomplish the data breach
As per the research done by Gupta (2018), psychometrics can
successfully measure the personal characteristics of a person. In this case
five dimensions can be used to determine the personality of the person.
Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Extroversion, Openness, and
Conscientiousness are the five dimensions that are used in this case. As
per the research done by Venturini and Rogers (2019), five dimensions
are named Ocean Method collectively. Michael Kosinski was the
psychologist who found a way to analyze people’s behavior on the basis of
their activities on the platform of Facebook. He had developed an online
application named “MyPersonality” which permitted individuals to
participate in a quiz on psychometric. The results provided was based on
Ocean Method and many of the Facebook users actively became a part of
it. This led to the formation of a huge psychological dataset. Aleksandr
Kogan, an academic wanted access to the dataset but was denied by
Kosinki. Using the same concept he build an app named
“thisisyourdigitallife” in 2014 and assembled data and the users
undertaking the quiz were being paid for the same. As per the research
done by Bennett (2018), the app recorded volumes of data and it was
transferred to Cambridge Analytica. The company designed software on
solutions which was used to convince the voters to choose a particular
candidate. The ex-employees named Christopher Wylie revealed this case
to the various newspapers and confirmed that the company had created
psychographic profiles in order to promote materials on pro-Trump and
influencing people to accomplish the goals. This firm had asked for
Facebook’s permission to collect data for some academic work but instead
it misused the data and used it for other purpose. As per the research
done by Schneble, Elger, and Shaw (2018), Facebook stated that the firm
had collected the data of Facebook users legitimately but Kogan had

5RECENT DATA BREACHES IN FACEBOOK
misled them and their policies were broken when the collected data was
transferred. As per the research done by Richterich (2018), Facebook has
banned “thisisyourdigitallife” in 2015 and the companies or agents who
took the data were ordered to destroy the same. Reports say that despite
of many warnings, Cambridge Analytica had kept the collected data,
retained. “The entire company is outraged we were deceived. As per the
research done by Richards and King (2016), we are committed to
vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people’s information and will
take whatever steps are required to see that this happens,” Facebook
said. The social media giant had assured the users that executives of the
firm are working on the various facts linked to the case. As per the
research done by Raab and Szekely (2017), the ICT professional is to plan
research, provide suggestions and plays a role in improving the systems
in the information security systems, the hardware and software and the
concepts associated for developing certain applications, associated
documentation that include the principles and procedures. The major
issue involved is that of the personal informations of the users being
manipulated in election campaigns. As per the research done by Sinanaj,
Muntermann and Cziesla (2015), the trust of users of Facebook was hurt
as they were the targets of the data breach and illegal accounts made are
touching a count of almost 80 millions. The data breach that has occurred
is a proof that in this technological age data is vulnerable to data
mishandle and attackers use these for their personal benefits. The
Facebook users are the ones mostly affected in this scenario as their data
was collected and misused. As per the research done by Manworren,
Letwat and Daily (2016), Facebook is also a victim in this case as the
company lost its user’s confidence and fined £500,000 for being the
source of the data scandal.
As per research done by Solove and Citron (2017), another instance
of a data breach related to Facebook was when 540 million records
concerning the Facebook users were exposed in public on the cloud
computing service of Amazon. As per the research done by Cheng, Liu and

6RECENT DATA BREACHES IN FACEBOOK
Yao (2017), two third-party app developers of Facebook made the records
public in plain sight, resulting in the data breach for the world's social
networking giant. As per UpGuard, a media company based at Mexico
held Cultura Colectiva responsible for the largest data leak. As per the
research done by Spiekermann (2015), this exposed almost 146
gigabytes of the user data of Facebook, that included account names,
details about comments, IDs and the reactions to posts. At the Pool an
application was behind the scandal as it exposed the data such as user Id,
pictures, check in and friends also including passwords of more than
22,000 users. The application was actually meant to aid the offline
activities but it instead did this scam and got shut in the year 2014. As per
the research done by Poornachandran et al. (2016), UpGuard had made
Cultura Colectiva and the retail giant aware of the breaches from the
company but no such actions were taken. The social networking giant is
under the federal criminal investigation for the deals it had made with the
electronics manufacturers in order to access the data of the users and has
been involved in many such security breaches over the last few years. In
the Cambridge Analytica case Facebook said that the informations of its
network were exposed after their network was attacked. As per the
research done by DeGroot and Vik (2017), data breaches are hazards to
firms as they adversely affect the organization’s growth added to the leak
of confidential data. As per the research done by Marchetti et al. (2016),
the ethical issues associated with that the scam collected personal data
that involved date of birth, gender, address and ZIP code making the
users vulnerable to engineering attacks that made use of the harvested
information. In the above case the ICT professional of Facebook is
responsible to perform audit in the organization in order to find out the
loopholes in the security and how is it possible that the social networking
giant could not know the intentions behind that of the data collection of
the Cambridge Analytica.
The data breach can be attributed to the company and the users as
well. The company could have taken measures to deal with the frequent
data breaches as it has been surrounded by many such instances since

7RECENT DATA BREACHES IN FACEBOOK
the last few years. As per the research done by Kude, Hoehle and Sykes
2017 (2017), the measures that could have saved Facebook from the
consequences are as follows:
1. Designing security devices and software security applications ensuring
the privacy of the users.
2. Managing the various security measures considering the information
technology system.
3. Operating inspections at a regular basis on the systems to keep regular
updates on the security of the user’s data.
4. Conducting audit at a frequent basis security purposes.
5. Customizing access to data of the account users according to the
regulations.
6. Maintaining the security related policies of users that must stick to a
defined standard.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook said, “it’s clear now that we didn't
do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That
goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as
well as developers and data privacy. We didn't take a broad enough view
of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and
I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what
happens here”. Many are of the opinion that companies like Google and
Facebook share the data of their users with advertisers as because the
service they provide free of cost actually is a trade of data. The Utah
republican said, “some have professed themselves shocked, shocked that
companies like Facebook and Google share user data with advertisers. Did
any of these individuals bother to ask why Facebook and Google don't
charge for access? Nothing in life is free. Everything involves trade-offs. If
you want something without having to pay money for it, you're going to
have to pay for it in some other way, it seems to me”
The users on the other part are also to be blamed for this as the
craze of Facebook has leaded them to post everything on the social media

8RECENT DATA BREACHES IN FACEBOOK
sites. As per the research done by Lee, Zhu and Jeffery (2018), there has
been increasing case of addiction of social media. It has been observed
that the people are more interested in uploading the pictures and location
they are rather than enjoying themselves at the place they are present.
As per the research done by Ablon et al. (2016), social media has been a
vital part of people’s life as the first thing they do after getting up in the
morning is to check the notifications, messages on the platforms and the
last thing they do before going to bed is wishing their virtual friends good
night rather than their family members. As per the research done by Al-
Saggaf and Islam (2015), the effect of social media is such that real life
has lost its importance and the virtual world has taken its place. FOMO
syndrome is a consequence of this excessive use of online sites. The
syndrome is about the continuous need to stay connected to the friends
online and in case an individual finds himself disconnected he get anxious.
Thus the blame can be equally divided in both the Facebook and its users.
Agreements of Facebook related to data breach
In the year 2011, Facebook made settlement agreements with FTC
after the charges of deceiving consumers by assuring them that they
could keep their information private on Facebook, but their informations
were exposed. The settlement required Facebook to implement certain
steps to make sure that it kept the promises in future, that included
providing consumers prominent notice and obtaining user’s content
before sharing their information crossing the privacy settings that has
been established by them (Golbeck and Mauriellom 2016). GDPR could
have possibly prevented the Cambridge Analytica data breach as it
provides the users with ownership control on their private data and also
gives them the right to make decisions on whether they are ready to
share their data or not. The policies present in Facebook are two-factor
authentication, changing privacy settings such as profile picture guard,
who can see my posts and are available to the users. The users need to
be blamed if they do not utilize these options and Facebook is to be

9RECENT DATA BREACHES IN FACEBOOK
blamed if inspite of these options there are privacy breaches. In case of
unauthorized logins the user should be notified immediately.
Conclusion
It can be inferred that data breaches are a common thing in this
technology laden days but the organizations dealing with user data should
be careful about the same and it is their major responsibility to protect the
privacy of the data as users’ trust depends on the way the firm secures
their confidential data. The individuals should be more careful while
posting updates and information on the social networking sites. The
frequent data breaches can be an alert to them and use of social media
sites must be limited. The society needs to focus on the real life more
than what is happening far away with someone else. Thus the data
breaches can be attributed to both the companies doing that and the
users exclusively using the applications irrespective of the situations they
are in.

10RECENT DATA BREACHES IN FACEBOOK

11RECENT DATA BREACHES IN FACEBOOK
References
Goodwin, I., Griffin, C., Lyons, A., McCreanor, T. and Moewaka Barnes, H.,
2016. Precarious popularity: Facebook drinking photos, the attention
economy, and the regime of the branded self. Social Media+ Society, 2(1),
p.2056305116628889.
Shulman, B., Sharma, A. and Cosley, D., 2016, March. Predictability of
popularity: Gaps between prediction and understanding. In Tenth
International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
Spiekermann, S., Acquisti, A., Böhme, R. and Hui, K.L., 2015. The
challenges of personal data markets and privacy. Electronic
Markets, 25(2), pp.161-167.
Manworren, N., Letwat, J. and Daily, O., 2016. Why you should care about
the Target data breach. Business Horizons, 59(3), pp.257-266.
Martin, K.D., Borah, A. and Palmatier, R.W., 2017. Data privacy: Effects on
customer and firm performance. Journal of Marketing, 81(1), pp.36-58.
Thomas, K., Li, F., Zand, A., Barrett, J., Ranieri, J., Invernizzi, L., Markov, Y.,
Comanescu, O., Eranti, V., Moscicki, A. and Margolis, D., 2017, October.
Data breaches, phishing, or malware?: Understanding the risks of stolen
credentials. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on
Computer and Communications Security (pp. 1421-1434). ACM.
Edwards, B., Hofmeyr, S. and Forrest, S., 2016. Hype and heavy tails: A
closer look at data breaches. Journal of Cybersecurity, 2(1), pp.3-14.
Cadwalladr, C. and Graham-Harrison, E., 2018. The Cambridge analytica
files. The Guardian, 21, pp.6-7.
Isaak, J. and Hanna, M.J., 2018. User Data Privacy: Facebook, Cambridge
Analytica, and Privacy Protection. Computer, 51(8), pp.56-59.
Common, M.F., 2018. Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: let this be the
high-water mark for impunity. LSE Business Review.

12RECENT DATA BREACHES IN FACEBOOK
Gupta, A., 2018. The Evolution Of Fraud: Ethical Implications In The Age Of
Large-Scale Data Breaches And Widespread Artificial Intelligence Solutions
Deployment. International Telecommunication Union Journal, 1, pp.0-7.
Venturini, T. and Rogers, R., 2019. “API-Based Research” or How can
Digital Sociology and Journalism Studies Learn from the Facebook and
Cambridge Analytica Data Breach. Digital Journalism, pp.1-9.
Bennett, C.J., 2018. The European General Data Protection Regulation: An
instrument for the globalization of privacy standards?. Information
Polity, 23(2), pp.239-246.
Schneble, C.O., Elger, B.S. and Shaw, D., 2018. The Cambridge Analytica
affair and Internet‐mediated research. EMBO reports, 19(8), p.e46579.
Richterich, A., 2018. How Data-Driven Research Fuelled the Cambridge
Analytica Controversy. Partecipazione e conflitto, 11(2), pp.528-543.
Richards, N.M. and King, J.H., 2016. Big data and the future for privacy.
In Research handbook on digital transformations. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Raab, C. and Szekely, I., 2017. Data protection authorities and information
technology. Computer Law & Security Review, 33(4), pp.421-433.
Sinanaj, G., Muntermann, J. and Cziesla, T., 2015. How Data Breaches Ruin
Firm Reputation on Social Media!-Insights from a Sentiment-based Event
Study. Wirtschaftsinformatik, (2015), pp.902-916.
Manworren, N., Letwat, J. and Daily, O., 2016. Why you should care about
the Target data breach. Business Horizons, 59(3), pp.257-266.
Solove, D.J. and Citron, D.K., 2017. Risk and Anxiety: A Theory of Data-
Breach Harms. Tex. L. Rev., 96, p.737.
Cheng, L., Liu, F. and Yao, D.D., 2017. Enterprise data breach: causes,
challenges, prevention, and future directions. Wiley Interdisciplinary
Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 7(5).

13RECENT DATA BREACHES IN FACEBOOK
Ablon, L., Heaton, P., Lavery, D.C. and Romanosky, S., 2016. Consumer
attitudes toward data breach notifications and loss of personal
information. Rand Corporation.
Al-Saggaf, Y. and Islam, M.Z., 2015. Data mining and privacy of social
network sites’ users: Implications of the data mining problem. Science and
engineering ethics, 21(4), pp.941-966.
Lee, S.U., Zhu, L. and Jeffery, R., 2018, September. A Data Governance
Framework for Platform Ecosystem Process Management. In International
Conference on Business Process Management (pp. 211-227). Springer,
Cham.
Spiekermann, S., Acquisti, A., Böhme, R. and Hui, K.L., 2015. The
challenges of personal data markets and privacy. Electronic
Markets, 25(2), pp.161-167.
Poornachandran, P., Nithun, M., Pal, S., Ashok, A. and Ajayan, A., 2016.
Password reuse behavior: how massive online data breaches impacts
personal data in web. In Innovations in Computer Science and
Engineering (pp. 199-210). Springer, Singapore.
DeGroot, J.M. and Vik, T.A., 2017. “We were not prepared to tell people
yet”: Confidentiality breaches and boundary turbulence on
Facebook. Computers in Human Behavior, 70, pp.351-359.
Marchetti, M., Pierazzi, F., Guido, A. and Colajanni, M., 2016, May.
Countering Advanced Persistent Threats through security intelligence and
big data analytics. In 2016 8th International Conference on Cyber Conflict
(CyCon) (pp. 243-261). IEEE.
Kude, T., Hoehle, H. and Sykes, T.A., 2017. Big data breaches and
customer compensation strategies: Personality traits and social influence
as antecedents of perceived compensation. International Journal of
Operations & Production Management, 37(1), pp.56-74.

14RECENT DATA BREACHES IN FACEBOOK
Golbeck, J. and Mauriello, M., 2016. User perception of Facebook app data
access: a comparison of methods and privacy concerns. Future
Internet, 8(2), p.9.

15RECENT DATA BREACHES IN FACEBOOK
Appendix
Fig 1. Shows the statistics of the data of those people who were a victim
to the data breach