Your personal data about you, your friends, your photographs, and all of that could be in the hands of the Russian government because of a slip-up by Facebook.
CNN has learned that the Russian company Mail.Ru Group has been collecting Facebook users’ data without their knowledge because of an extension granted by Facebook.
Mail.Ru Group, a Russian internet company, developed hundreds of apps through Facebook, which up until 2015, had the ability to download personal user information and the personal information of all those users’ friends.
A source tells CNN Mail.Ru Group, which claims to have only tens of thousands of users in the United States, would have had access to the data of millions of Americans who were friends with those users.
And that scooped-up personal information was almost assuredly scooped up by Russia’s Intelligence Service, the FSB.
“Mail.Ru Group is a large Russian company,” former United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Carpenter said. “It has to abide by Russia’s laws. It has to do with what the intelligence services demand of it, and in this case, they demand that they provide access to all of their data. All of that has to be available to the Russian Intelligence Services.”
That means if you were on Facebook before the end of 2015, and connected to anyone who used Mail.Ru or its apps, the Russian government could have had access to your personal information, including your name, gender, birth date, location, photos, and page likes.
Mail.Ru denies gathering Americans’ private information, saying in a statement, “We have not collected data on any Facebook users, other than for the purposes of in-game mechanics.”
No matter, James Lewis with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says Russian Intelligence would be very interested.
“Big data is the secret today to intelligence, and if the Russians who are very good at this have access to a pot of big data, I would not be surprised if they used it,” Lewis said.
Mail.Ru had access to American users’ personal information at a time when Russia was launching its disinformation campaign through Facebook and other social media–and began to meddle in the 2016 United States election.
In a statement to CNN, Mail.Ru is claiming user data was neither shared with or made accessible to any Russian government agency.
And the company also claims to have never harvested friends of users’ data.
The company says it is now cooperating with Facebook on the internal investigation.