Updated 1:10pm: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday addressed the data controversy that has embroiled the company since the weekend, saying in a Facebook post, "We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again."
Facebook is under fire. Bet Mark Zuckerberg didn’t see this coming years ago when he invented Facebook so high school and college friends could stay in touch and exchange thoughts and pictures.
Two billion users later, Facebook is now facing lots of criticism and is even being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission over the way personal information, sponsored posts and fake news is managed and used by Facebook and others.
The news that a political research firm called Cambridge Analytica basically grabbed the personal profiles of some 50-million Facebook users to better target political ads in an effort to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, along with the Russian trolling during the campaign, have a lot of Facebook users worried, angry or both.
So what do you do about it? Are there ways to make sure your personal profile and personal info are not accessed, used and..you not know it?
There is, according to social media experts, but Facebook doesn’t make it easy to find. It’s there, way down at the bottom of some of those personal preference pages on Facebook, but you have to spend some time getting through it and making the changes.
There are those who now think all this news about the use of personal profiles will lead to new laws in Congress to protect Facebook users.
But over the years, all of us who use Facebook, have let the genie get out of the bottle because of our desire to share what we do on Facebook and still be okay knowing that Facebook a for-profit company, is using some of what we do on Facebook to make a profit.
As Dr. Steven Andres at San Diego State puts it…it’s not Facebook dot org, but Facebook dot com. Hear my interview with him about this on San Diego’s Evening News tonight at 6:10 here on KOGO.