Stolen Facebook Data Stored in Russia?

If the words of Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie is to be believed, then the data of more than 87 million Facebook users, the firm has gathered from Facebook could have been stored in Russia. Christopher Wylie also said that the number of Facebook users, whose personal information were acquired by Cambridge Analytica could be higher than that of 87 million users as acknowledged by Facebook.

He also acknowledged that the data may have reached a lot of people and is stored by various kind of people and country including Russia, which is a genuine risk to the country’s security, when he said “It could be stored in various parts of the world, including Russia, given the fact that the professor who was managing the data harvesting process was going back and forth between the UK and to Russia”.

Aleksander Kogan, the Russian data scientist who developed the Facebook personality test app in 2014 and gathered information from millions of US citizen and then passed the information to Cambridge Analytic, which worked with President Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

Aleksander Kogan, also used to give lectures at St. Petersburg State University, and quite often-visited Russia, that’s where the suspicion of data storage in Russia arises.

In the year 2015 Facebook first came to know about the data theft that Kogan had shared the information with Cambridge Analytica, but then the world’s largest social networking company did not inform the public about it and it asked all parties involved to destroy the data or information available with them saying transferring and selling the data is against the company’s guideline.

But now there are reports that not all the data was deleted. Christopher Wylie also says that the data could have been copied several times after it left Facebook's database.

When he was asked whether Facebook could determine how many people had access to the information, Wylie said “I know that Facebook is now starting to take steps to rectify that and start to find out who had access to it and where it could have gone, but ultimately it's not watertight to say that we can ensure that all the data is gone forever”.

In several occasions Aleksander Kogan has denied breaching Facebook policies, but Facebook has countered every time saying Kogan has breached the Facebook policies in several ways, including transfer of data to a third party for commercial purpose.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly apologized for his company's involvement in the scandal in TV interviews and newspaper posts and now is going to testify before Congress and answer their questions about how his company Facebook, protects the data of its more than 2 billion users.

Christopher Wylie has also said that the main reason behind his blowing the whistle is to alert everyone about the risk of the data exposure to other people and country bringing threat to his own nation. He also said that, US authorities including investigators and officials from Department of Justice have contacted his lawyer and he assured he would cooperate with them in the investigation to protect the country from the biggest data sharing scandal-involving millions of Facebook users.