Aleksandr Kogan collected direct messages sent to and from Facebook users who installed his This Is Your Digital Life app, the Guardian can reveal. It follows Facebook’s admission that the company “may” have handed over the direct messages of some users to the Cambridge Analytica contractor without their express permission. Wylie told the Observer that he had seen a table, produced by Kogan, that included private messages. On 21 March he noted that apps such as Kogan’s “could also request users’ private messages [ie their Facebook DM inbox] via the ‘read_mailbox’ API request”. Albright said at the time that Facebook should “immediately” share the API access that it had granted Kogan, as well as whether or not private messages were collected.

Source: The Guardian April 13, 2018 04:52 UTC