Facebook: Let the freeloading user beware

Published December 20, 2018 5:00am ET



People still use Facebook, but one revelation after another confirms that the company shares its users’ data in ways they neither realized nor expected.

Two prominent political examples of this were exposed when President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and Cambridge Analytica, a vendor that sold data to Republican campaigns, acquired access to the profiles of nonconsenting Facebook users in 2012 and 2016, respectively. Data on the “friends” of people who downloaded apps and took surveys allowed campaigns to target voters, although it should be noted that they did so with scant success.

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