NEW DELHI: In the wake of recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, many Facebook users were taken by surprise when they discovered that the social media is such a behemoth that stores far more information of the users than what they expected. Many thousands of people have started the process of deleting their Facebook accounts completely forever citing privacy issues. Many leaders from the tech industry too have come down heavily against FaceBook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg, who had already admitted last week that the Facebook scandal over privacy flaws was “a major breach of trust”. In fact #DeleteFacebook has remained one of the top trends across social media platforms.

Users of Facebook also found that Facebook not only stores the data submitted in its domain, but also all the data of logs having incoming and outgoing calls from a user’s phone as well as store data of all SMS messages, according to a report in The Guardian. Many of such users who found the details and privacy concern have decided to delete their accounts from the community chat service.

A movement was raised with tag #DeleteFacebook, which urged people to shut all their Facebook accounts over breach of privacy, after it was revealed that Facebook had secretly shared their personal information for about 50 million users, without their taking their explicit consent, with a Cambridge psychologist. That data later ended up in the hands of the election consultancy Cambridge Analytica, af firm that offers data analytics services for political parties around the world and even has an India link. Though both BJP and Congress have denied links to Cambridge Analytica, records show some other side of the case.

According to a report in The Guardian, Facebook has made it very much difficult for users to delete their accounts on the domain, and instead pushes them only towards “deactivation” of their account, which at last leaves all their personal information and data on Facebook’s servers forever.

In its response, Facebook said, “The most important part of apps and services that help you make connections is to make it easy to find the people you want to connect with. So, the first time you sign in on your phone to a messaging or social app, it’s a widely used practice to begin by uploading your phone contacts,” The Guardian quoted a statement released by Facebook’s spokesperson.

“Contact uploading is optional. People are expressly asked if they want to give permission to upload their contacts from their phone – it’s explained right there in the apps when you get started. People can delete previously uploaded information at any time and can (later) find all the information available to them in their account and activity log from our Download Your Information tool,” the statement adds.

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