The latest company to be found having ” leaked” user data is Facebook. https://www.toptechnews.com/article/index.php?story_id=10300CJLC3G
Some people are upset by it. Some less so. There were hopefully no credit cards leaked in this one but there was a fair amount of personal information. From the site, “Cambridge Analytica harvested profile information from more than 50 million Facebook users without their permission, the Associated Press reported”. Apparently a Facebook developer harvested all that data and “leaked” it to Cambridge Analytica.
Obviously the best way to protect ourselves against these kinds of things is to not have that information out on Facebook. Do not put anything online that you wouldn’t want your Mom or your next door neighbor to know about as the old saying goes. The scale of it is large. Some people apparently thought they had a bit more privacy on the website than they actually did. Privacy policies apparently don’t mean much if the queries were being made internally. I think there is a similar problem over at the NSA that a guy called Snowden talked about a few years ago. It will be interesting to see if anything comes of this.
aaronjolson 