Facebook has come under intense scrutiny in recent years after news broke that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to President Donald Trump’s campaign, may have had information on millions of Facebook users without their knowledge.

It is believed that the information was used “to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements”.

In the words of Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower who worked with Kogan to obtain the data, and who has come forward to reveal his role in the affair: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

And, in a blog post published 4 April 2018, Facebook confirmed that even more people – beyond the initial 50 million – had been affected by the scandal.

At the end of a lengthy piece, authored by Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer, the company said simply: “In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people – mostly in the US – may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.”

Facebook has been entirely redesigned as part of a huge privacy revamp