Over 400,000 Vietnamese affected by Facebook data leak

In the latest development, Facebook Inc said data leak hits up to 87 million users, including 420,000 people in Vietnam.

In the latest development, Facebook Inc said data leak hits up to 87 million users, including 420,000 people in Vietnam.

   

Vietnam among top 10 countries affected by the scandal

In March, it was discovered that message logs, phone numbers and other private information of millions of Facebook users have been shared with the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica in the UK without consent. Over 70 million users are in the US. Vietnam also had 427,446 people hit by the leak and was among the top 10 countries affected by the scandal.

According to the online statistics, market research and business intelligence portal Statista, as of January, Vietnam has 55 million Facebook users. That means 0.77% of the users have their information leaked.

One of the reasons that make the information easy to grab is that Vietnamese users often share their information publicly instead of sharing with friends or themselves only. They also installed many apps without reading about permissions.

Facebook Inc is implementing several policies to help protect the users after the scandal such as disabling the service that allows others to use a mobile phone number or email address to find someone on Facebook.

Facebook will also limit the authorisation given to third-party apps to avoid data mining. Michael Schroepfer, Chief Technology Officer of Facebook Inc, said they would no longer allow third-party apps to access users' private information such as religion, political views, marital status, friend lists or hobbies.