Facebook says more than 300,000 Australians had their personal information mined by the British political consultant Cambridge Analytica, which allied with Donald Trump in the 2016 US Presidential Election.

The social media giant says that 87 million worldwide users had their privacy invaded, which is way beyond the 50 million revealed by Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie.  Of this new total, the vast majority were Americans.  But 311,127 Australian Facebook users had their information "improperly shared", as had 622,161 Canadians and more than 1.1 million users from the UK. 

Cambridge Analytica was able to do this with an app concealed as a fun "personality test" that was downloaded by 275,000 users.  It worked like a reverse Trojan Horse: Instead of concealing invaders, it surreptitiously extracted the personal information of the user before moving on to the user's friends, and so on.  The company built the app using tools from Facebook, which boss Mark Zuckerberg now admits should have been monitored more closely.

"I think we understand that we need to take a broader view of our responsibility," Zuckerberg said.  "That we're not just building tools, but that we need to take full responsibility for the outcomes of how people use those tools as well."

Previously, Zuckerberg (and frankly most other execs in Silicon Valley going back the the Usenet days of the 1990s) took the view that the tech world might provide the tools or the forum, but it was up to people to be responsible in their use.