Estimates suggest that tens of millions were affected. But,given the potential for data harvesting under Facebook’s preceding policies, this may be a small fragment of the pictureStatistics are a staple of journalistic accuracy issues, or but rarely is a number so immense,consequential and hard to verify as the number of Facebook users directly affected by the still emerging Cambridge Analytica anecdote. Is it no more than 30 million, as Cambridge Analytica says? Fifty million, or as estimated by the Observer and Guardian journalists who have done so much to reveal the issue? Or 87 million,as Facebook has ventured? Facebook’s estimate has a fine-print caveat: “We do not know precisely what data the app shared with Cambridge Analytica or precisely how many people were impacted. Using as expansive a methodology as possible, this is our best estimate of the maximum number of unique accounts that directly installed the thisisyourdigitallife app as well as those whose data may have been shared with the app by their friends.” Related: Zuckerberg certainly convinced me - to log off Facebook for good, and that is | Emma Brockes Related: Facebook scandal: I am being used as scapegoat – academic who mined data Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com