A total of 6,111 Maltese Facebook users have fallen victim to improper sharing of their personal data involving political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica, it has emerged.
While additional information on who the users might be has not yet been made public, the social media giant will from Monday be rolling out new features that will allow those affected to find out whether their data has been improperly shared.
According to Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer, a link will appear at the top of users’ newsfeed and will enable them to not only monitor what applications they use but also the information that has been shared with those apps.
A special note on whether any data has been passed on to Cambridge Analytica will also be included.
On Friday, the European Commission revealed that 2.7 million EU citizens have had their data shared with the analytics firm, including in Malta.
Users of the social media platform were affected in all 28 EU Member States, with the largest amount of data collected from the UK, where 1,079,031 users were affected, followed by 309,880 in Germany and 214,134 in Italy.
The number of users in Malta that were targeted was higher than that in Estonia, Latvia and Luxembourg, countries with higher populations.
In the Netherlands, 89,373 users were affected, and 63,080 in Portugal. 60,957 Belgians’ profiles were harvested, and 59,480 in Greece. In Poland, 57,138 users were affected; in Sweden, 55,337; in Ireland, 44,702; in Denmark, 41,820; in Bulgaria, 35,718; in Austria, 33,568; in Hungary, 32,067; in the Czech Republic, 29,376, in Croatia, 21,517; in Finland, 19,693, in Lithuania, 15,123; in Slovakia, 14,846, in Slovenia, 11,255; in Cyprus, 7,455; in Malta, 6,011; in Estonia, 5,510; in Latvia, 4,757, and in Luxembourg, 2,645.
Cambridge Analytica made headlines last month after a whistleblower claimed that in 2014, 50 million Facebook accounts were harvested by the UK-based company. Last week, Facebook said that it believed the figure was much higher and that there were in fact 87 million users who were affected.
Last year, journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia had suggested that the Labour government had made use of the company’s services to get Adrian Delia elected as PN leader.
Sources have since told the Times of Malta that one of Cambridge Analytica’s top executives was known to have been in Malta ahead of the last general election.
Both the Labour Party and the Nationalist Party have denied meeting with executives from the company.