Facebook data misuse scandal affects "substantially" more than 50M, claims Wylie

Chris Wylie, the former Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower whose revelations about Facebook data being misused for political campaigning has wiped billions off the share price of the company in recent days and led to the FTC opening a fresh investigation, has suggested the scale of the data leak is substantially larger than has been reported so far. Giving evidence today, to a UK parliamentary select committee that's investigating the use of disinformation in political campaigning, Wylie said: "The 50 million number is what the media has felt safest to report -- because of the documentation that they can rely on -- but my recollection is that it was substantially higher than that. So my own view is it was much more than 50M." We've reached out to Facebook about Wylie's claim -- but at the time of writing the company had not provided a response. "There were several iterations of the Facebook harvesting project," Wylie also told the committee, fleshing out the process through which he says users' data was obtained by CA. "It first started as a very small pilot -- firstly to see, most simply, is this data matchable to an electoral register… We then scaled out slightly to make sure that [Cambridge University professor Alexsandr Kogan] could acquire data in the speed that he said he could [via a personality test app called thisisyourdigitallife deployed via Facebook's platform]. So the first real pilot of it was a sample of 10,000 people who joined the app -- that was in late May 2014. "That project went really well and that's when we signed a much larger contract with GSR [Kogan's company] in the first week of June… 2014.