18 Apr So your Facebook Data has been Hacked – What next?

Like half the population of the planet, we have been enjoying the endless memes of Mark Zuckerberg being grilled by the US Senate this week in response to the Facebook hacking scandal that has quite rightly rocked the social media giant to the core. All this information new to you? Let us recap:

Facebook is in a spot of trouble. Cambridge Analytica, a British political consultancy firm that uses data mining, data brokerage and data analysis with strategic communication for the electoral process, used the social media giant to collect personal data of over 87 million users to help with voter influence. This is now known as the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal that basically interfered and took personal information without consent.

How did they do this? Apps – Facebook is littered with fun and seemingly harmless games, competitions, surveys, polls and photo sharing applications that constantly pop up on your timeline as they are liked and shared by other users. These apps mostly arrange an informed consent process for research purposes, meaning the app is collecting important data about the user. Although most are harmless and simply run adverts to gain financial improvement, many, created on behalf of political parties, harness data and information that can then post messages and content to help sway persuasion.

Not convinced you have been affected? Marketing and advertising on Facebook is based on relevant data consents that you give it in order for the social media platform to remain free. What you reveal is key to making those adverts you see relevant to your needs – this is behavioural advertising and is in commonplace across every social platform. However, the harnessing of data for political use is a larger cry of ill behaviour that has led people to question what they are really giving away when they play Candy Crush or like that video of a back flipping dog.

So what next? Well, the solution can be both extreme and non-existent – delete your Facebook account and live without the biggest social media platform in the world, or do nothing, safe in the knowledge that you care little about who has your data as you could never be influenced by Fake News….

Our solution is a happy ‘meet-in-the-middle’ concept that we share with our partners from Acronis. Hacking on Facebook is nothing new and the tech team from Acronis have been aware of the issues for a couple of years now, taking time to develop best compatible services to secure your data in the right way.

Acronis True Image lets you make a replica of account data, including photos and videos (both your own and the ones in which you seem to be constantly tagged in), events and liked pages, as well as your profile of course.

The 3 step process can be offered to all students in an educational establishment and the data can be stored on your computer or into your personal cloud – giving you full security control.

Want to see how the easy setup process with the Acronis Click Dashboard can work for you? Come talk to your Academia account manager today about seeing a live test.

For all press and PR enquiries, please contact the marketing team on pr@oldsite.academia.co.uk