Can Facebook be trusted with your personal info? Voter harvesting scheme shows perils for users
SAN FRANCISCO — Can Facebook be trusted with your personal information?
That's the question many Americans are asking as Facebook scrambles to contain a growing firestorm over revelations that a data-mining firm working for the Trump campaign improperly got its hands on the personal information of tens of millions of people and created remarkably detailed and intimate profiles that were used to target unsuspecting voters in the presidential election.
For many, the incident raises troubling new questions about how Facebook manages third-party access to the sensitive information of its 2 billion users, including what safeguards the social media giant has in place to prevent third parties from sharing information with others and whether it has any way of knowing when that information is shared more broadly than intended.
Facebook says a researcher, Cambridge University's Aleksandr Kogan, gained access to the data of 270,000 Facebook users in 2013 through a personality quiz app that required Facebook users to grant access to their personal information including friends and "likes."
According to Facebook, he then gave that information to Cambridge Analytica, the firm that claimed it helped President Trump win the 2016 election. Facebook says that was a violation of its rules and, on Friday, it suspended Cambridge Analytica. On Monday it announced that Cambridge Analytica had agreed to an independent audit by a digital forensics firm.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/438464002
The word is getting out to America in plain language.
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and we'll tell you which Taylor Swift song you are!
The first line of defense must be the end user -- us. It is ironic that people who grew up fully immersed in the internet are the ones who are usually the most vulnerable. Or maybe it's just that I'm GenX that makes me so distrusting. 
in 1997.
We had the web before the public library.
I remember it taking overnight to download an image.
I went straight to early Windows. My wife, on the other hand, has fond memories of life before a GUI.
I remember in grad school I had an older lap top (might as well have been a desk top it was so huge). I wanted to get internet access, so I ordered it (probably AOL or something similar I got in the mail). For some reason it wouldn't work after I installed it, so I had to call the help line. We went through a long process of testing before he asked me how much RAM my machine had. I told him I had 8 megs, and there was the problem! I needed at least 16. I opted for a new computer over upgrading my RAM.
