High Court to decide if Facebook is liable for the possible breach of 300,000 Australians' personal data
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Loading... - Kirsten Cooper
- 22 Mar 2023
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A personality quiz on Facebook, which led to the now-infamous Cambridge Analytica data breach, will take centre stage in the High Court of Australia as the social media company's owner, Meta, battles it out with the national privacy commissioner.
As the High Court will hear, in 2014, Cambridge Analytica worked with a Facebook application developer to create an application that was at the root of a massive data breach, estimated to have collected data from more than 90 million Facebook users worldwide without their knowledge or consent.
The application collected this data not just by pulling information from the public profiles of those who used Facebook to log into personality quizzes, but also by collecting details from anyone who was friends with them on the social media site.
In Australia, 53 people logged in to the quiz through Facebook, which is believed to have exposed up to 300,000 Facebook friends to a possible data breach.
It later emerged the material obtained by Cambridge Analytica was used for psychological profiling to target political messages in the 2016 Trump election campaign in the United States.
When the issue came to light in 2018, Facebook moved quickly to sever ties with Cambridge Analytica and to warn users who were possibly affected.
The company has now also moved to restrict data access to third parties more broadly.
Facebook has already faced court action and substantial fines of billions of dollars in the UK and US. Read More…
