How to check if your Facebook data was misused

NEW YORK (FOX5NY.COM) - You can now check if you were one of as many as 87 million people whose data may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, a data-mining company linked to Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

This week, Facebook began notifying users whose information was compromised by the now-banned personality quiz app called "This Is Your Digital Life."

That Facebook app, created in 2014, vacuumed up the data of hundreds of thousands of users who were paid to take the survey. But thanks to Facebook's loose restrictions, the app also harvested data from those users' friends.

If you didn't see a notification in Facebook alerting you of being affected, you can double-check on Facebook's Help section. While you're there, you can check what other apps have permission to access information from your profile.

In response to the data-mining scandal, Facebook unveiled redesigned privacy control settings and posted revisions to its terms of service and data policy to "show people in black and white how our products work."

Facebook has admitted that it did not have adequate protections in place to stop an app from improperly gathering and sharing your information. The company outlined several steps to restrict access to data.

With the AP