Facebook said Wednesday that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to President Donald Trump's campaign, may have had information on about 87 million Facebook users without the users' knowledge, reports CNN.
Previous reporting had put the number of people whose information may have been shared with Cambridge Analytica at around 50 million. Facebook announced its own estimate in a blog post on Wednesday.
The 87 million number is the maximum amount of people that could have impacted, according to Facebook's calculations. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a call with reporters on Wednesday that it got to that number by looking at the maximum number of friends its users had at the time.
"I'm quite confident given our analysis it is not more than 87 [million]. It very well could be less. But we wanted to put out the maximum we felt that it could be as soon as we had that analysis done," said Zuckerberg.
Facebook has said the data was initially collected by a professor for academic purposes in line with its rules. The information was later transferred to third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, in violation of Facebook's policies.
Cambridge Analytica disputed the number.
"Cambridge Analytica licensed data for no more than 30 million people from GSR, as is clearly stated in our contract with the research company. We did not receive more data than this," the company said in a statement.
Starting next week, Facebook will tell people if their information was shared with Cambridge Analytica.
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