In a new blog post published Wednesday morning, Facebook announced that even more people—beyond the initial 50 million—have been affected by the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
At the end of a lengthy piece, authored by Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer, the company said simply: "In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people—mostly in the US—may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica."
Last month, the British data analytics contractor which worked with Donald Trump's presidential campaign retained private data from 50 million Facebook users despite claiming to have deleted it. The scandal has spawned numerous lawsuits, and it has put significant pressure on Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.
Thus far, Cambridge Analytica and its affiliate companies have claimed that they did nothing wrong. The London offices were raided on March 23 by local investigators.
In the blog post, Schroepfer also announced a number of changes to Facebook's use of customer data, including the collection of phone calls and SMS messages revealed by Ars Technica last week.
Schroepfer reiterated Facebook's previous statement that users had given permission for that data to be collected, writing: "Call and text history is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android."
The data was used to "surface the people you most frequently connect with at the top of your contact list," Schroepfer said.