It appears that Communications and Information Minister Rudiantara’s much publicized threats to block Facebook “without hesitation” if the social media giant were found to have allowed the private information of Indonesian users to be leaked was just talk, following yesterday’s revelation that data analyst firm Cambridge Analytica had mined the private data of over 1 million Indonesians.
After a meeting with representatives of Facebook Indonesia yesterday afternoon, Rudiantara made no mention of any legal threats against the social network, instead urging Facebook to comply with Indonesia’s laws.
“We ask Facebook to immediately block some third party apps, particularly personality quizzes. What has happened all this time was Cambridge Analytica used the quiz for that purpose (mining users’ private data),” Rudiantara said, as quoted by Okezone.
Rudiantara added that he wants Facebook to determine exactly how many Indonesians were affected by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, as well as their identities.
Representatives of Facebook Indonesia said they were happy to comply with the minister’s wishes, which is basically what Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer had already said the company would be doing throughout the world anyways.
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, and the Philippines, which had 1.175 million affected users.
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.
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