As many people know by now a company called Cambridge Analytica used a Facebook app to scrape data from any user who authenticated with Facebook when taking a survey from them.
Scraped data is any information that users gave authorization to Cambridge Analytica to gather which could be names, emails, phone number, hometown, and more personal data. Along with personal data, they were able to see all of your activity on Facebook to include all of your likes, comments, and friends list.
With access to your friends list, Cambridge Analytica, was able to get the public profiles of your friends as well as their publicly available information and public likes. So, even if you didn't personally use the Cambridge Analytica apps, chances are one of your friends did and that left you vulnerable as well.
After the information was collected, it was sold to be used to target ads at people to put them in an echo chamber essentially. If you believe Donald Trump is a great man, you were fed ads and news stories to harden that opinion. If you believed all the stories about Hillary Clinton scandals, you were fed ads and stories deepening those thoughts. It's a highly effective way to influence people without them realizing they are being influenced.
Now Facebook has created a tool to see if you were an intentional or unintentional victim of Cambridge Analytica's app scam.
As you can see, I didn't log into the app, but one of my 7 Facebook friends did and my public information was scraped as well.
Click this link to see if your data was stolen as well.
