Enforcement officers for the Information Commissioner spent nearly seven hours investigating the London offices of Cambridge Analytica in March 2018 after a High Court judge granted a search warrant Jack Taylor/Getty Images

Up to 87 million people had their Facebook data scraped by political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. And now you can find out if you were among them.

As of April 9, Facebook users affected by the data breach will start seeing a message at the top of their News Feed. Only those who directly used – or were friends with someone who used – the “This Is Your Digital Life” app, developed by the researcher Alexander Kogan, will be notified.


But anyone can check if their data was collected by heading to Facebook’s help pages. To find out, just click here and read the automated message from Facebook. All clear? Great. Caught up in the scandal? Here’s what you can do...

All Facebook users are being encouraged to check the social network’s well-hidden privacy settings to see which apps and websites have permission to access their Facebook data. While you can revoke access now, this won’t mean that any data collected is deleted by third parties. And that’s where things get complicated.

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As Facebook’s privacy protections were alarmingly lax prior to a major policy change in 2014, any of your friends who took part in personality quizzes and other Facebook games may have inadvertently handed over all of your Facebook profile data to third parties without your direct consent. Tracking down exactly how much of your profile data has been exploited in this way is likely to prove impossible.

In short: there’s very little you can do. Revoke access to all apps and websites you don’t want to share your Facebook data with and spend some time going through Facebook’s myriad of privacy settings to make sure everything is locked down. Any data that was leaked in the past is now long gone and it will likely take years to understand the full scale of the scandal.


While notifying users affected by the Cambridge Analytica scandal is a start, Facebook’s response has been widely criticised. After threatening news outlets about to break the story with legal action, Facebook has since sought to downplay the scale of the breach that led to the profile data of 87 million people being handed to the Trump and Brexit affiliated political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

The dataset, in full, was: the about me section of your profile, actions, activities, your birthday, check-ins, history, events, games activity, groups, hometown, interests, lives, location, notes, online presence, photo and video tags, photos, questions, relationship details, relationships, religion, politics, subscriptions, website and work history.

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Once the story broke, Facebook span the revelations by emphasising that only 270,000 people downloaded the app. That number was immediately rubbished by reports that 50 million users had been affected. Facebook then buried its official figure of 87 million users at the bottom of another announcement.


While it will be reassuring (or not) to know if you were one of those 87 million, there’s nothing you can do about the misuse of your data. Cambridge Analytica claims it has deleted all the data, but Channel 4 news reports that a version if it is still in circulation and was used by Republications to target voters in Colorado.

A number of reports have also confirmed that the data is known to have been shared outside of the servers of Cambridge Analytica and linked company Strategic Communications Laboratories.

While the effectiveness of Cambridge Analytica’s much-hyped political influence has been called into question, that Facebook allowed data from millions of its users to be captured and improperly used to influence democratic processes has caused major damage to the social network’s reputation.