'Utterly horrifying': ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine

Sandy Parakilas says numerous companies deployed these techniques - likely affecting hundreds of millions of users - and that Facebook looked the other way

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users are likely to have had their private information harvested by companies that exploited the same terms as the firm that collected data and passed it on to Cambridge Analytica, according to a new whistleblower.

Sandy Parakilas, the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012, told the Guardian he warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach.