Washington Post wrote:Facebook said Wednesday that most of its 2 billion users likely have had their public profiles scraped by outsiders without the users' explicit permission, dramatically raising the stakes in a privacy controversy that has dogged the company for weeks, spurred investigations in the United States and Europe, and sent the company's stock price tumbling.
The acknowledgment was part of a broader disclosure by Facebook on Wednesday about the ways in which various levels of user data have been taken by everyone from malicious actors to ordinary app developers.
"We’re an idealistic and optimistic company, and for the first decade, we were really focused on all the good that connecting people brings," Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said on a call with reporters Wednesday afternoon. "But it’s clear now that we didn’t focus enough on preventing abuse and thinking about how people could use these tools for harm as well."
I have a Facebook account, but not under my own name. It's just convenient to have to log in to some sites. But a lot of other people's lives are out there.
We are still coming to grips with the differences between the industrial age and the information age. Instantaneous transmission from billions of people on the planet means that much of humanity has grown new nerve endings, which are constantly being jostled and irritated by new information streams. For many, the reality now is that their personal data is in the hands of people who will try to use subliminal methods to specifically target individuals. If advertising is like codeine, micro-targeted advertising is like Fentanyl.