We’ve all become slaves to our social media accounts, there’s truly no denying of this fact. I know people, who will remain anonymous at the risk of any one of you going to their house and judging them publicly, who care more about the amount of followers they have on Instagram (FB) than the amount of credit card debt they’re currently drowning in. For one reason or another, we are enamored with the vanity that is social networking. Sticking with the Insta example for a moment, if someone posts a perfectly edited photo of themselves sipping on a glass of rose in Europe, we automatically assume they have it all, but, in actuality, this person may be severely depressed. Also, its likely that their “perfect photo” took twenty minutes to get just right.
Though humanity is truly addicted to various social platforms, it’s not the fault of the consumer, but more so the companies responsible for creating sites and applications that are so captivating. Not only are they fun to use, but these applications require our personal information, so its only natural that we’re constantly checking our profiles to see what’s being done with our data. Having said that, tech companies do a pretty solid job of convincing us that our information is completely safe, without any possibility of a breach, that is, until a data breach takes place.
Facebook (FB) is one such social media company that just cannot seem to catch a break, whether it’s their own fault or otherwise. To be fair, you, as the largest social media platform in the universe, partner up with consulting firm who lied about their intentions to perform psychological research on 270,000 but ended up selling user data from 50 million profiles to help the Republican Party take the 2016 election, it’s completely justifiable that you catch flack from the media.
After months of silence, it would seem that Facebook (FB) needs to tear down their “days since last incident” counter and start all over. The Company confirmed Thursday in a blog post, that during a routine security review in January, they found “that some user passwords were being stored in a readable format within their own internal data storage systems.”
In an attempt to dissuade the likely onslaught of internet rage from angry Facebook (FB) users, and other callous trolls, the Company tried to explain themselves.
“To be clear, these passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and we have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them. We estimate that we will notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users…”
–Facebook official statement regarding recent password breach
According to recent statistics regarding Facebook’s (FB) password announcement, as many as 600 million users could be affected — roughly 20% of Facebook’s user base, but Facebook (FB) has yet to confirm these numbers.
Putting it as plainly as can be, data breaches are not an attractive look for any company, especially one that has been in the spotlight for potentially helping foreign entities interfere with domestic politics. One would think that Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Facebook (FB), would guide his company in a safer direction, and tighten up the loose screws. Nevertheless, he is one of the richest people on the planet and I’m sure he knows what he’s doing.
