Facebook said on Wednesday that an estimated 622,161 Canadians may have had their personal data shared with the British data analysis company Cambridge Analytica.
Company spokesperson Meg Sinclair told CBC News in an interview that the number of Canadians impacted by the data breach was a fraction — 0.7% — of the 87 million people worldwide that may have been affected. The majority of those users, nearly 82%, are based in the United States.
The disclosures about Canadian Facebook users comes in the wake of one of the biggest data privacy scandals in history. It was announced in March that an academic researcher named Aleksandr Kogan had collected information from more than 50 million Facebook users in 2014 using a personality quiz app, and then shared that information with Cambridge Analytica. Facebook has faced a rash of public criticism over the data breach, with many people canceling their accounts on the social media site.
However, Facebook has unveiled a much larger discovery: that the majority of its two billion users likely had their publicly available profile information scraped and collected by unknown actors in recent years. Such information would have been visible to friends and strangers alike, but could have included potentially revealing data such as photos and contact information if a user had not chosen — or known — to change their settings to “private.”
The user profile data, which included biographical information and personal information, was used to help Cambridge Analytica's clients —including Donald Trump's presidential campaign — better target their advertisements.
