Can Facebook's algorithms control our population and politics? Yes, and it is uniquely bad, says François Chollet, an artificial intelligence researcher at Google and author of the well-known machine learning library Keras. But in hyping up the power of AI, he is underestimating how hard it is to change … Read …

A voter-profiling firm that worked with Donald Trump's campaign improperly obtained information on 50 million Facebook users, but experts say the data was both extremely valuable and possibly worthless. Cambridge Analytica, which worked with both Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's presidential … Read More

Last week, when news broke (again) that Cambridge Analytica had allegedly misused 50 million Facebook users' data, it immediately raised a difficult question: When a company possesses information about some 2 billion people, is its chief obligation to share that information, or protect it? The answer's … Read More

When Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg posted a status update Wednesday on the still-unfolding Cambridge Analytica scandal, he called it an “issue,” a “mistake” and a “breach of trust.” But he didn't say it was a data breach. Ever since the news broke this weekend that the U.K. firm Cambridge … Read …

Depending on how you look at it, Mark Zuckerberg took either five days or two years to respond publicly to the data privacy crisis that has rocked Facebook, sent its stock price tumbling, and inspired users to delete their accounts. Zuckerberg, after all, has known that Cambridge Analytica, a data …

Patrick Cosgrove (Letters, 21 March) argues that the answer to the Facebook data scandal is simple – stop using Facebook. Alas, this completely misses the point. A few of us have never been a member of Facebook, but they still hold data about us, gathered from our friends and family …

And it probably goes without saying that Twitter, like Facebook and many other social networks, mines user data for advertising and other purposes. But it feels a lot less cluttered than Facebook, and there's a robust browser-based interface for people who prefer to network on their PCs. Read More

Have you heard? Facebook is collecting vast troves of demographic and behavioral data about you — yes, you, even if you don't use Facebook — and is using it to help advertisers target you and your friends. In some cases, developers hooked into the Facebook platform are extracting data about …

Investment manager Ross Gerber thinks Facebook is in deep trouble after the Cambridge Analytica data leak. On CNBC's "Closing Bell," Gerber argued that "social media has peaked" and predicted that "daily active users in the North American region in Facebook will decline in this quarter, and will … Read More

Although it is true that Facebook comments including the word “BFF” in green are among known animations, its appearance (or lack thereof) is not related to account security in any way. A missing green “BFF” does not indicate anyone's account was compromised ay any point, and instead most likely … Read …