Facebook just can't catch a break -- not that many think it should.
It's been almost a month since the Cambridge Analytica story first broke[1]. Since then, there's been a firehose of bad news about Facebook's privacy and data practices that's called into question if the tech giant can act with its users' (and its shareholders') best interests at heart.
Read also: Trump-linked data firm Cambridge Analytica harvested data on 50 million Facebook profiles to help target voters[2]
This week, Facebook admitted that as many as 87 million users[3] may have had their data "improperly shared" with the voter profiling data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.
Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, has been doing the fire-fighting rounds, trying to disaster-manage the scandal. She did a lengthy interview with NBC News, where she described how the company "should" have come clean to its users about the mass data exfiltration, and it "should" have checked that Cambridge Analytica deleted the collected data -- when, in fact, it didn't. And then, she said on BuzzFeed that the series of crises that Facebook's had to handle during the past month, costing the company over $80 billion in value, are her "responsibility."[4][5]
But every time Sandberg sandbags one corner of the company's collapsing reputation, another load-bearing wall crumbles down.
Read also: Data breach exposes Cambridge Analytica's data mining tools[6]
The latest Facebook dust-up landed Thursday when TechCrunch revealed[7] that messages sent by the social network's co-founder, Zuckerberg, and other senior executives were remotely deleted by the