Facebook confirmed Thursday that 562,455 users in India may have had their personal data accessed after using the Cambridge Analytica app This is Your Digital Life.
Up to 335 Indian users downloaded the app, which could have exposed all the data of those users’ friends, Quartz reported.
India was the seventh-most affected country from the data breach that the social media site disclosed Wednesday compromised 87 million users’ personal information in total. Cambridge Analytica said it only licensed data from 30 million people, and that a subcontractor, Global Science Research, obtained data from more than twice that number of people.
“They include any and all friendships that existed at any time between when the app first became active on the Facebook platform in November 2013 and when the app’s access to friends’ data was limited in May 2015,” Facebook said in the statement. “They also include users who may have changed their settings to disallow sharing of their data with the app, due to limited historical information about when or how those settings were updated.”
Out of the 87 million people who had their data compromised, the U.S. was the most severely affected from the breach, resulting in 70.6 million users’ data being compromised.
Although India provides the social media platform with its largest user-base with over 241 Facebook users, it was not nearly as affected as the U.S. However, the tech giant did submit an official response Thursday to the Indian government regarding the breach.
“Cambridge Analytica’s acquisition of Facebook data…happened without our authorisation and was an explicit violation of our platform policies,” Facebook said in a statement to Quartz. “At no time did Facebook agree to Cambridge Analytica’s use of any Facebook user data that may have been collected by this app, including with respect to users located in India.”
