Facebook can’t seem to stop being the butt of all online privacy jokes.
Even after several warnings, Court hearings, Mark Zuckerberg does not seem to care about serious privacy fouls and doesn’t look interested in stopping them anytime soon. The company’s history of pervious data sharing continues to haunt both itself and its helpless users on a regular basis.
On Wednesday, researchers from the cybersecurity firm UpGuard shared that they found two massive troves of exposed Facebook user data that had been posted publicly on Amazon cloud servers. More than 540 million user records were sitting in plain sight, available to anyone who found them. The data included users’ passwords, names, comments, and likes.
Less than two weeks ago, Brian Krebs, an American journalist and investigative reporter revealed that Facebook had been storing the passwords of hundreds of millions of Facebook users in plain text that was accessible to more than 20,000 Facebook employees at the click of a button.
With no comprehensive federal data privacy regulation that at least notifies users if their sensitive information has been breached, people’s information is up for grabs by tech companies. There have been some proposals in Congress that would impose requirements on how platforms handle user data, but at the moment there’s no piece of legislation that guarantees the safety of the end user.
The internet is still a wild jungle with no stringent regulations. The multi-billion tech companies that amassed wealth overnight are least concerned about the safety concerns for its users.
So it’s up to us to deal with it, but, what can we do?
At the moment deleting our facebook accounts wouldn’t help much since the damage has already been done by us in the past. Whether we’ve deleted our account or not, we’re still being tracked by Facebook’s massive online ad ecosystem.
The best users can do is change their passwords from time to time and go over through all their privacy settings and discard unnecessary connected apps they’ve granted access to.
Otherwise, if you think that Facebook and other tech companies should be subject to laws that force them to treat user data responsibly, the best you can do is let your elected officials know.
We have fancy locks for our homes and state of the art security cameras to protect us offline. Why not think a bit about taking Online life seriously too?
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