Over 5 lac Indians potentially affected by Facebook data breach

Cambridge Analytica expose that had opened a pandora box for social networking giant Facebook refuses to tame down. Now in a new confession of sorts, Facebook has said that the number of users whose information was illegally shared with the UK firm stands at 87 million, way above than the previous estimation of 50 million. This includes over 5 lac Indians too. The highest percentage of affected users though belong to the US with the figure of 70 million.

These numbers were shared by Facebook's CTO Mike Schroepfer in a blog post where he spoke about social network's latest initiatives pertaining to privacy settings including restricting third-party app access and deleting phone call and text information that's over a year old.

Facebook has also disabled the feature to search a user by their email address or phone number which has been abused by malicious actors and reduced the overall control that the app will have on user data.

"Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we've seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way," Schroepfer said in the post. "So we have now disabled this feature."

Indian government had issued notices to both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, seeking their responses regarding the data breach of Indians and if it was used to influence elections. While Facebook has submitted its response saying over 500,000 Indian users could have been potentially affected by the data breach, Cambridge Analytica is yet to reply back.