Notre Dame IT experts warn users of Facebook quizzes amid breach scandal

Protecting your online data continues to be a concern for many after 50 million Facebook users’ data was breached back in 2015 and allegedly used during the U.S. Presidential campaign.

Now local cyber experts are weighing in on how you can keep your information from being exposed.

Mike Chapple one of only a few it professors at Notre Dame and he says this data breach is unlike anything you’ll probably ever see.

“It’s made people wake up a little bit to the sharing that’s done and understand the way personal information can be reused online,” said Mike Chapple, Associate Teaching Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations at the University of Notre Dame.

Weekly developments continue to shock internet users as we learn more about the 2015 scandal and it all stems from those Facebook personality quizzes.

“A British researcher named Alexander Kogan wrote a personality quiz on Facebook. They tell you what Hogwarts school you’re in or something like that and people took that quiz. It gave their information to the researcher,” said Chapple.

What makes this data breach worse is what the researchers then did with that data.

“Kogan then resold that information to a firm called Cambridge Analytica and they’re a political consulting firm and they used some of that information on behalf of the Trump campaign,” said Chapple.

And if you were a target, so were your friends.

“The way Facebook was configured back then, Kogan was able to get access not only to information about people who took the quiz, but also to all of their friends,” said Chapple. He says Facebook has been under fire since the scandal happened, even though Facebook asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the Facebook user information.

“This is just one example, there could be very well be many situations like this where developers have stored information about Facebook users and kept that and are continuing to use that without Facebooks knowledge,” said Chapple.

Chapple says the lesson for everyone going forward is to be cautious of what you partake in on the internet.

“I’m certain that nobody expected that when they too this quiz their information was going to wind up in the hands of a political campaign,” said Chapple.

You can avoid this from happening to you by logging on to Facebook and deleting any information that you don’t want shared. You can also check your privacy and security settings to make sure that you’ve locked your accounts down as much as possible.