Facebook Admits Millions More People Were Impacted by Cambridge Analytica Breach Than Previously Known

Facebook said Wednesday that personal data for up to 87 million people--tens of millions more than originally thought--may have been "improperly shared" with Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics firm that worked for Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. Most of those affected were in the United States, the company said. Facebook included the disclosure in the second-to-last paragraph of a company statement that also described new measures to restrict third-party access to user data. Recent stories in the New York Times and the British Observer cited a former Cambridge Analytica employee, Christopher Wylie, who said that the Facebook data of more than 50 million people had been harvested and provided to Cambridge Analytica in 2014. The data was acquired, Wylie said, in the hopes of building personality-based models to target and influence voters in US elections.