Is deleting Facebook the answer?

Today, I didn’t delete Facebook. I probably won’t tomorrow or any time soon.

I know. Facebook screwed up. It let a partner collect your data and the data of all your friends and then that partner shared it outside of Facebook.

Most of what Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan did, building an app that harvests data not only from the Amazon Mechanical Turk Participants but every single one of their Facebook Friends, is not expressly against Facebook’s rules. But sharing it to a third-party, Cambridge Analytica, was a big no-no.

When Facebook realized that Kogan and, by extension, Cambridge Analytica had broken their data privacy rules, it immediately told them to delete all the data.

Facebook did not:

• Follow up on this request
• Alert any of the potential 50 million Facebook users that they may have been the subject of a data hijacking.

I don’t call it a breach because this wasn’t a hack. Kogan got the data through then legitimate means and he didn’t have to crack a single Facebook user’s account. All of us on Facebook give up this data every single day.

Take a minute, right now, to travel to your Facebook’s Settings page, specifically the Apps home. It’s in the fourth section on the left-hand menu. If…