Technology developed by a company in Waterloo, Ont., is being used by regimes and democracies throughout the world to censor online content, according to a new global investigation conducted by Citizen Lab.

There's "a huge gulf" between what users expect when they give information to Facebook versus the reality in this case, the mass scraping and aggregating of public profile data without their knowledge.

Facebook says an estimated 622,161 Canadians may have had their data shared with the British company Cambridge Analytica. In a conference call with reporters, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: "We didn't take a broad enough view of what our responsibility was. And that was a huge mistake."

A small Canadian company has been caught up in the scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, the British consulting firm that mined the data of 50 million Facebook users to aid their clients political campaigns, but just what is AggregateIQ and how is it connected to the data leak?

A Canadian online advertising company widely credited for its outsized role in convincing British voters to leave the European Union was also used in an effort to sidestep Brexit campaign spending limits, according to a whistleblower.

With a $300-million investment in journalism-related initiatives, the tech giant wants to show it's taking the spread of disinformation, the manipulation of its platform, and threats to democracy seriously.