Officials with Facebook has been notified that the company will receive a letter from the Federal Trade Commission asking how the consultancy firm of Cambridge Analytica gained access to the personal data of 50 million of its users.
FTC officials informed Facebook that they will be asking both how the firm gained access to the data in 2014, and why users were not notified by Facebook about the breach, according to a story from Bloomberg.
Cambridge Analytica is a political consultancy firm. It was the firm President Donald Trump’s campaign hired to help with the 2016 election.
If the thought of having your personal information at risk keeps you up at night, there is something you can do about it.
You can delete your account.
Here is how you do that:
To delete a Facebook account
Click on the link below, and choose "Delete my account":
That’s all you have to do, and your account is deleted from Facebook. There are a few things to keep in mind, however – Facebook delays deleting the account for a few days in case people change their minds, for example.
Once an account is deleted, it can take a month and a half before all of the information and photos associated with the account are deleted from the backup server, and you cannot gain access to that content after you delete the account.
Also, according to company officials, material such as records of when you were on the site will remain in its database, but will not be connected to any “personal identifiers.”
If you want a copy of what’s in your account before you delete it
You can save the photos and messages on your account before you delete it by going through the following steps on Facebook:
- Go to the account menu
- Click the down arrow at the top right of any Facebook page
- Click "Download a copy of your Facebook data" at the bottom of the General Account Settings
- Click "Start My Archive"
Remember, deactivating the account is different from deleting the account. If you choose to deactivate the account to take some time away from social media, you can always go back and reactive the account.
Deleting the account means ending it so neither you nor others will be able to see it again.
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