Is Facebook Stealing your Data?

Facebook is a widely popular company that is in the news a lot. Their CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, can be seen as somewhat of a controversial figure, stemming from some of his business decisions to his lousy testimonies in front of the Congress. Facebook has been at the forefront of discussions about big tech corporations taking data from their customers and selling it. Many times, Facebook and Zuckerberg are questioned, sometimes on national TV, about data breaches and the lack of privacy their customers have when it comes to their information and data on Facebook. However, despite all of this, Facebook still manages to get away with acquiring and selling data, and still hasn’t faced harsh enough punishments and criticism. An example of this is in this article talking about a recent slip up by Facebook for a breach of security, allowing for the leaking of the data of 533 million of its users on the internet.

Not only is this unacceptable, but it is a problem that Facebook has been had for years now, and yet here they are still doing it, releasing things like birthdays, email addresses, and locations on the internet for free. However, instead of raising awareness to these awful and unacceptable actions Facebook committed, the article just goes on talking how it could've happened and fails to state anything about Facebooks horrible actions. This is a huge problem and something that I am very disappointed the article did not include and talk about. Yes, I believe the article did talk about some important things about data, such as databases being hard to share because people try to monetize it, data leaks threatening to undermine Facebook’s model for sending out ads, and the information leaked is on a free hacking forum, making it very accessible for people with data skills to access. Although all of this is relevant and important, there is another side of this story that needs to be discussed, and that is the unacceptable and unethical behavior by Facebook here. They continue to do things like this and get away with them. Why hasn’t the news been reporting on this? Why didn’t the author of this article condemn Facebook for this? These are important questions that need to be asked and answered. Facebook is a multi-billion-dollar company that should be able to have top-notch data and top-notch systems to protect from data being leaked. It is getting extremely frustrating that large media outlets and news organizations are failing to condemn Facebook for continuing to leak their customers data. I am very frustrated and upset with articles like this, and I believe that something needs to be done to start raising more awareness towards Facebook and other big tech companies taking and leaking their customers data. I think this article does a good job of explaining what is happening and why it is happening, but it fails to condemn and recognize what Facebook is doing is very wrong and that they should be punished for it. 

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-03/facebook-data-on-533-million-users-leaked-business-insider