Top Story— Facebook has just lost over $60 billion in market value over the past two days—that’s more than Tesla’s entire market capitalisation and almost three times that of Snapchat.
Facebook shares plunge over revelations that personal data of 50 million users was obtained and misused by British data analytics firm ‘Cambridge Analytica,’ who reportedly helped Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016.
The privacy scandal that rocked the social media giant was revealed earlier this week when Chris Wylie, the 28-year-old data scientist who worked with a Cambridge University academic, turned into a whistleblower and leaked to the newspapers how poorly Facebook handles people’s private information.
Wylie claims Cambridge Analytica created “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindf**k tool” that profiles citizens to predict their voting patterns based on the personal information gathered from a variety of sources and then helps political parties target voters with tailored advertisements and messages.
Source: Facebook and Cambridge Analytica – What’s Happened So Far
