I woke up this morning to my friends checking if they were one of the over 1 million Filipinos whose data had been stolen by Cambridge Analytica. The Philippines was the second hardest-hit country in the data leak. With news reports investigating if CA had a hand in influencing the Philippine national elections, many people came to the (largely incorrect) conclusion that if your data was leaked, you were then “brainwashed” into voting for a certain candidate.
It’s not that straightforward. Here’s how I understand what could have happened to our data (and yes, I was one of those whose information was scraped). Check if your Facebook account was affected.