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There is an unwitting mole amongst my friends. Without my permission, they passed my personal information to a Facebook app called “This Is Your Digital Life”, which eventually ended up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica, the company famed for using questionable tactics in an effort to influence election campaigns.

Facebook won’t say for certain exactly what happened, nor which friend was involved. Only 270,000 people ever used the This Is Your Digital Life (TIYDL) app, but Facebook estimates that data from 87 million people ended up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica this way.

As a result, Facebook’s boss Mark Zuckerberg spent last week being grilled by the US congress. In the UK, a legal team is gathering claimants to take Facebook to court for mishandling their data. Where did it all go wrong?

Personal information can sound so vague, so let’s be specific. People who used the TIYDL app gave it permission to access their friend’s Facebook public profile page, date of birth, current city and pages they had liked. Facebook also says that “a small number of people” gave permission to share their own timeline and private messages too, meaning that posts or correspondence from their friends would have been scooped up as well.

Private messages

This all happened around 2014 and 2015. When I scroll back through Facebook to this time I see a lot of private messages with friends full of intimate details. I would feel weird about sharing them with anyone other than who they were intended for. That they may have helped target political campaigns without my knowledge is hard to swallow.

However, nearly all of this was completely above board, says Facebook, because I agreed to it. I suppose that happened when I first signed up to the platform in 2007, or during one of the firm’s regular emails about updates to its terms and conditions that no one actually reads.

The TIYDL app was originally created by University of Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan as a research project on how someone’s online presence corresponds to their personality traits.

Kogan gave data from the app to Cambridge Analytica, . The UK’s information commissioner is also investigating whether it broke . Data collected for research purposes can’t be given to a private company for a different use without consent. But Kogan says that Facebook knew his intention to pass it on and that it was written in the TIYDL app’s terms and conditions.

After reporters told Facebook about the situation in 2015, Facebook told Cambridge Analytica that it had to delete the data. Cambridge Analytica said it did this, although whistle-blower Christopher Wylie claims it didn’t.

Public outcry

Increasing public outcry means that Facebook is now informing those people involved. Last week it released a tool that lets people check if their data was involved – . I used it and found, to my surprise, that a friend has used the app.

Of course, I and others should have paid more attention to the terms and conditions, but a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in 2012 found that it would take the average person . Glossing over them isn’t just laziness, it is necessary.

“People are only now getting to grips with it,” says Frederike Kaltheuner at the charity Privacy International, who also had her data passed to the TIYDL app by a Facebook friend. “It’s not clear if what happened is illegal, but a more interesting question is if it’s not, then why not?”

Ravi Naik at ITN Solicitors is to see if the latest revelations warrant action against Facebook for potential misuse of data. “We’ve had about 100 to 200 enquiries and I imagine that is going to snowball,” he says. I’m not joining the lawsuit, for risk of losing a reporter’s objectivity, although I did consider it.

Legal precedent

One legal precedent for this case is when Paul Burrell, former butler to Princess Diana, successfully won £5000 from PR man Max Clifford in 2016, says Naik. Burrell had hired Clifford to help manage his public image, but Clifford passed information about him to a newspaper, which the UK courts decided was a misuse of private information. Clearly, the details are very different, and it seems unlikely that Facebook would accept such a compensation package lightly. Multiplying £5000 by 87 million soon adds up, even for Facebook.

Facebook has cleaned up some of its privacy policies since 2015 and it is no longer possible for friends to share so much information about you, but for many people it’s not enough. It is still very difficult to get Facebook to truly delete information it holds about you, and opting in to and out of certain aspects of the platform is still very limited.

As more people complain to Facebook, to their government or via the legal system, things may start to change further. But all the indications are Facebook’s hand will have to be forced. “Only after the revelations are people starting to understand the value of their data and that they actually have strong data rights,” says Naik. “This realisation is happening en masse.”