FACEBOOK INSISTS THAT CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA DIDN'T "BREACH" DATA, BUT "MISUSED" IT, AND THEY'RE WILLING TO SUE ANYONE WHO

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Yesterday's bombshell article in the Guardian about the way that Cambridge Analytica was able to extract tens of millions of Facebook users' data without their consent was preceded by plenty of damage control on Facebook's part: they repeatedly threatened to sue news outlets if they reported on the story and fired the whistleblower who came forward with the story.

It's been more than a year since The Intercept reported that Cambridge Analytica paid mechanical turks to take a personality quiz, and then exploited a Facebook loophole to extract the personal information of 30,000,000 users who were Facebook friends with the people who filled in the quiz.

What's new here is that a whistleblower has come forward with the backstory of the hack, and more details, including a revised estimate of the number of user records Cambridge Analytica breached: 50,000,000.

The whistleblower is a young Canadian data-scientist named Christopher Wylie who worked for Canada's Liberal Party and the UK Liberal Democrats before being recruited into Cambridge Analytica; Wylie then went to work for Facebook, who have just suspended him for talking to the press about Cambridge Analytica's abuse of Facebook data and Facebook's complicity in that abuse.