Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg acknowledges that user privacy has been stolen

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in the US Congress on Tuesday that the application rights that led to the theft of 87 million user data and the sale to Cambridge Analytics may also allow the company to access the inbox of these users.

Rather, this is not done by any means, but people may not realize that they are allowing reading and recording their private messages, as well as more public data, such as location and hobbies.

The news may have been collected by Cambridge Analytics, which was first disclosed by Facebook itself as part of its warning to 87 million affected users. The company warned that "a few logins - this is your digital life" people also share their own news feeds (News Feeds), timelines, posts and messages, which may include your posts and messages."

Facebook has not previously disclosed access to the news. Of course, if an affected person is chatting with you, then your information will be collected.

The application permissions used to do this kind of thing are called "read_mailbox", but use a more regular language when asking for user consent. For example "This app will be able to access your wall posts, friends list, contacts, messages..."

The app called "This is your digital life" was developed by Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan and became the "harvester" for all of this data. It will request permission to read "mailbox" for a period of time. And, as Facebook told the tech magazine Wired, a total of 1,500 people approved this permission.

It's unclear why this number is so low. If hundreds of thousands of users agree to the terms, the application may only request a short period of message access and may stop the request when it finds that someone is blocking the authorization.

Still, even if only 1,500 people are directly collected, the number of users whose information is collected indirectly can be orders of magnitude higher. Anyway, check your inbox, if you have one - there may be dozens of conversations, maybe hundreds of people. The number 1500 may soon become 150,000.