Over 5 lakh Indian users’ data may have been ‘improperly’ shared with Cambridge Analytica, says Facebook

"The numbers that we have now are that only 335 people in India installed the App, which is 0.1% of the App's total worldwide installs,'' it says.

In a first revelation, Facebook has said that data of nearly 5.6 lakh Indian users may have been “improperly” shared with British political analytics company Cambridge Analytica (CA).

Responding to a notice from the Government of India , a spokesperson for Facebook said:

"We are investigating the specific number of people whose information was accessed by the app, including those in India.

Also Read

If data is the new oil, how much does an Indian citizen lose?

 

"Cambridge Analytica’s acquisition of Facebook data through the app developed by Dr. Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research Limited (“GSR”) happened without our authorization and was an explicit violation of our Platform policies.

"The numbers that we have now are that only 335 people in India installed the App, which is 0.1% of the App's total worldwide installs.

"We further understand that 562,120 additional people in India were potentially affected, as friends of people who installed the App. This yields a total of 562,455 potentially affected people in India, which is 0.6% of the global number of potentially affected people.”