To be precise, this is not achieved by any means, but people may not realize that they are allowing to read and record their private news, as well as more public data, such as their location and interests.
The news may have been collected by Cambridge Analytics, which was first disclosed by Facebook itself as part of its warning to 87 million affected users. The company warned: 'a few logins' is your digital life's People also share their own news feeds, timelines, posts, and messages that may include your posts and messages.
Facebook has not previously disclosed access to the message. Of course, if someone affected has chatted with you, then your information will be collected.
The permission to use this type of application is called 'read_mailbox', but it uses a more everyday language when soliciting user consent. For example 'This application will be able to access your wall posts, friends list , Contact, Message...'
This application called 'This is your digital life' was developed by Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan and became the 'harvester' for all of this data. It will request 'read mailboxes' for a period of time. , And just as Facebook said to the technology magazine Wired, a total of 1,500 people have approved this permission.
It is unclear why this figure is so low, if there are hundreds of thousands of users agreeing to this provision, but the application may only request a short message access, may stop the request when it is found that people prevent the authorization.
Despite this, even if only 1500 people are directly collecting information, the number of users who indirectly collect the information may be several orders of magnitude higher. In any case, check your inbox, if you have one – there may be several Ten conversations may be with hundreds of people. The figure of 1500 may soon become 150,000.