Indonesia 3rd most affected country in Cambridge Analytica scandal, over 1 million users’ data mined says Facebook

Over a million Indonesians may have had their personal information improperly collected by data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) on Facebook, according to an estimate by the social media giant itself, given as the company moves to restrict data access in response to CA’s huge data mining scandal.

In a press release issued today, Facebook says it believes that personal information of 1,096,666 Indonesians were mined by CA, making Indonesia the third most affected country behind the US, which accounted for over 70 million or 81.6% of the Facebook information that was improperly shared with CA, while the Philippines was second with 1.175 million.

In total, Facebook estimates that 87 million people were affected by the data privacy breach scandal around the world, almost double that of initial estimates from media investigations conducted by The New York Times and The Guardian.

CA, a data analysis firm with ties to US President Donald Trump’s election campaign, was accused of mining people’s personal information on Facebook without their knowledge through third-party apps. The firm then allegedly used that data to create tools that could identify the personalities of voters in an election and influencing their behavior by tailoring the content they see on Facebook.

Facebook says that starting next week, it will notify users whose data was mined by CA. The social media giant is also taking steps to limit what kind of information third-party apps can collect, such as restricting their ability to view users’ personal information like religion and political views. Apps now also require approval from Facebook to access groups and pages, and are no longer able to view the identities of the users within them.

Indonesia’s Communications and Information Minister Rudiantara said on Tuesday that he would not hesitate to block Facebook should it be found that the private data of Indonesian citizens had been breached. However, the government has not announced any further action yet following Facebook’s latest revelation.