Facebook has been embroiled in scandal since revelations that data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica misused personal information from as many as 87 million Facebook accounts. Cambridge Analytica received the data from a Facebook personality quiz Kogan created. That app collected data on both users and their Facebook friends.

Facebook has attempted to clarify the full amount of data that it collects on its users. In a post titled'Hard Questions: What Information Do Facebook Advertisers Know About Me?' the scandal-hit site details everything it collects and attempts to explain why it does it. The full scale of that data has been laid clear in recent weeks as the company has been attacked for the vast amount of information it collects on its users. In a new post, it promises that it is not compromising people's privacy in the way that it collects data about them. And it aggressively attacks the common suggestion that Facebook's users are its product, writing that it simply uses its ads to make sure it can keep that free.

The researcher whose quiz app sparked a data scandal at Facebook said the social network's stance blaming him is just "PR spin." During an interview Monday morning with NBC's Today show, Alexander Kogan said the data he collected through the app was no different than what other researchers have done working with Facebook. "If I knew the project was going to make them upset I would never do it," said Kogan. "A lot of other developers collected way more data and cared a lot less about their relationship with Facebook." Kogan has been blamed by Facebook for inappropriately sharing user data with Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, which then used it to launch targeted advertising during the 2016 presidential election.

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A former employee of Cambridge Analytica who claims the firm used the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook profiles to allegedly help Donald Trump's election campaign, is to testify before US Congress. Christopher Wylie said he had accepted an invitation to give evidence to the US House Intelligence Committee and House Judiciary Committee this week. He disclosed last month that the political consultancy firm had harvested data from users of the social media site by using personality quizzes to build up psychological profiles. As the US election approached, he said it then used this data to target them with bespoke political advertising. His revelations triggered investigations in the UK and US.

Kogan told CBS' "60 Minutes" he was "sincerely sorry" for assuming that everyone knew their data was being mined, but didn't care. He was the one who designed the personality quiz that granted access to personal data ― location, gender, birthday and page likes for the person taking the quiz as well as their friends ― on tens of millions of Facebook users.

Hint! Check Part I first, where we introduced a simple algorithm to analyze the sentiment of a given document. In this article we will talk about different modifications that might help us improve the performance of our classifier. To create a good classifier with the model described in Part I, we need a big and properly labelled corpus in order to compute a comprehensive word-sentiment occurrence table. In the training corpus, there should be statistically enough examples of each word in different contexts so the occurrences computed in the table can leverage a good approximation of their real probabilities (frequencies). There are several techniques aimed to reduce the dimensionality of the problem to make it more manageable.

Facebook is looking into a security report that reveals Facebook user data can be snatched by JavaScript trackers if they're planted in websites that let users log in with their Facebook credentials. Not just their name and email address, either: The exploit catches age range, gender, locale and possibly a profile photo too, depending on how much access the user allowed said website. Once someone logs in, any third-party JavaScript can supposedly retrieve their info at will. The report, by Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy website Freedom to Tinker, listed 431 of the top one million sites (by Alexa rank) that have the shady scripts embedded. The list included cloud database provider MongoDB until TechCrunch brought the issue to their attention, after which they allegedly shut down the abusive script.

The committee said it had called Aleksandr Kogan from the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge to discuss his relationship with Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based political firm also accused of improperly accessing data.

Brittney Kaiser, a former employee for Cambridge Analytica -- who left the company in January and is today giving evidence in front of a UK parliament committee that's investigating online misinformation -- has suggested that data on far more Facebook users may have found its way into the consultancy's hands than the up to 87M people Facebook has so far suggested had personal data compromised as a result of a personality quiz app running on its platform which was developed by an academic working with CA. Another former CA employee, Chris Wylie, previously told the committee the company worked with professor Aleksandr Kogan to gather Facebook users' data -- via his thisisyourdigitallife quiz app -- because Kogan had agreed to work on gathering and processing the data first, instead of negotiating commercial terms up front. CA's intent was to use Facebookers' data for political microtargeting, according to evidence provided by Wylie. I should emphasise that the Kogan/GSR datasets and questionnaires were not the only Facebook-connected questionnaires and datasets which Cambridge Analytica used. I am aware in a general sense of a wide range of surveys which were done by CA or its partners, usually with a Facebook login – for example, the "sex compass" quiz.