Despite intense protests, the Facebook of 50 million people, wrongly collected by Cambridge Analytica, has not yet been deleted. At least not all of it.
Instead of that, a fairly large portion of personal information is still exposed and no handling by Mark Zuckerberg and his associates is enough to fix it.
This became absolutely clear from London’s Channel 4, which managed to see the data of 136,000 people that are today in the hands of a “source of Cambridge Analytica”. In other words, someone, somewhere, still has this information.
These “data sourced from Facebook” were focused on the residents of Colorado and were initially used for Cambridge Analytica’s election efforts.
To make matters worse, it is unclear how many people or groups of individuals still have access to this data, which they assured us had been deleted. According to Channel 4, the profile data were “transferred using generally non‑corporate email systems”, which means it is likely that this one of their sources is not the only one that holds this information.
This is definitely something that will not be liked much by those whose profiles are in this set of data.
“This is an attempt to manipulate our society by people who are not truly interested in it”, said a citizen on Channel 4. “They only care about their business”.
A similar dataset continues to exist for the residents of Oregon as well.
This certainly does no good at all to Zuckerberg's image, who tried to downplay the whole issue with a post on Facebook on March 21, in which he claimed that his company “demanded” both Cambrige Analytica and the researcher who received the data “to officially certify that they had deleted all the inappropriate acquired data”.
“They provided these certifications”, Zuckerberg insists.
It seems, however, that no one on Facebook felt the need to check whether the data were actually deleted.
