Facebook, the social media giant of United States was in a plan to get access to private medical records of those residing in the United States and was in a mindset to match the records to user profiles via “Hashing” technology.
A source from Facebook claims that the project was aimed to track down patients who needed special care. For instance, if an elderly person did not have any friends or family living nearby, doctors could send in a nurse to check them after a serious injury. And those reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders say that the project was being led by Stanford Cardiologist called Freddy Abnousi.
But after the disclosure of the Cambridge Analytica scandal using 85 million Facebook user profile data to influence US 2016 polls, the project is said to have been paused until September this year.
Meanwhile, Facebook has released a tool on its News Feed section which will help all the affected 87 million Facebook users to know whether their data was shared with the London based data analytics company called Cambridge Analytica.
Starting on Monday (April 9th, 2018) all 2.2 million users of the Mark Zuckerberg led company will receive a notice on their feeds detailing them about the apps which are linked to their respective Facebook accounts.
On another note, in an astonishing statement released by Cambridge Analytica controversy whistleblower Christopher Wylie, it is said that the leaked data could have been stored in various parts of the world including Russia. Wylie added that it will be extremely difficult to confirm on who gained access to the leaked Facebook information and the derivates of the data.
Note 1- Canada born Christopher Wylie was working for Cambridge Analytica and was in charge of the data harvesting schemes and techniques employed by the UK firm till 2015. He was the one who first leaked out the data related to scandal to the “Guardian”; which is now being investigated by the law enforcement of United States.
Note 2- Facebook announced on Friday last week that it will allow users to un-send their messages following news that Mark Zuckerberg’s messages have been cleaned up from his Inbox by his staff. As the news about the company’s ability to tamper with the Messenger triggered fresh data security concerns among its users, the company rolled out the latest feature.
