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After Facebook admitted to a global leak of user information, the social media platform said on Thursday that 5.62 lakh Indians were ‘potentially affected’ in the episode involving UK-based data miner Cambridge Analytica.
Responding to the Indian government’s show-cause notice issued to it sent last week, a Facebook spokesperson said that only 335 people in the country had installed the application that leaked information to CA. This corresponded to 0.1 per cent of the app’s worldwide installations.
“We further understand that 5,62,120 additional people in India were potentially affected, as friends of people who installed the app. This yields a total of 5,62,455 potentially affected people in India, which is 0.6 per cent of the global number of potentially affected people,” the spokesperson added.
A senior official in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) told BusinessLine, “Facebook has confirmed that Indian data were shared. Now, we will wait for responses from Cambridge Analytica before taking any further step.”
CA has sought an additional seven days beyond April 7 to send its responses.
Meanwhile, sources said Facebook told the Indian government that it should not be held responsible for any misuse of user data as CA and Global Science Research Limited (GSR) had accessed the data without authorisation.
The company is believed to have told the government that both CA and GSR are “not downstream entities or affiliates of Facebook” and that the two had “made independent decisions regarding the data they obtained via the app”. Facebook, the sources said, argued that it had not authorised CA and GSR to mine the data, and by doing so, they had breached its policies.
The data-breach episode had sparked a furore in India, with Law and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad warning the social media giant of stringent action for any attempt to influence Indian elections through data theft.
He had also threatened to summon Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The government sent Zuckerberg a show-cause notice on March 28, asking if the company, or its related or downstream agencies, utilised Facebook data to manipulate the Indian electoral process. Facebook was asked to respond by April 7.
“We submitted our response to the government ahead of our deadline,” said the Facebook spokesperson.
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