Facebookers await news on what Cambridge Analytica stole

Facebook was due to tell its ­Australian users from last night if their data was stolen in the Cambridge Analytica privacy breach.

Facebook was due to tell its ­Australian users from last night if their data was stolen in the Cambridge Analytica privacy breach as its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, faced a potentially make-or-break week in Washington.

Mr Zuckerberg will appear ­before congressional committees for two days from tomorrow.

Under fire for a range of perceived offences, the sometimes-remote Mr Zuckerberg will face his toughest test proving to sceptical politicians that the tech giant he created 14 years ago takes privacy issues seriously.

He will also be grilled over how Facebook was used to sway the 2016 presidential election.

The estimated 311,129 Australians whose personal data might have been improperly handled by the British market-research firm tied to President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign were expected to get a detailed message on their feeds from last night.

Additionally, all 2.2 billion Facebook users globally will receive a notice on their feeds titled “Protecting your information”, containing a link to information on their interactions with third-party apps.

Last week Facebook announced Cambridge Analytica was able to improperly use data on 87 million Facebook users globally, up from 50 million. The incident prompted the Australian privacy commissioner to open a formal investigation.

In 2015 Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge in England, violated Facebook’s data policies when he shared user data gleaned from his personality prediction app with others including Cambridge Analytica. In a post last week, Mr Zuckerberg said: “If we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well.”