First, a primer, courtesy of the Daily Beast: 

Zuckerberg has been publicly silent since the Observer and the New York Times reported on Saturday that Facebook has for years been aware that a third-party app, billing itself as collecting user data for research purposes, exploited sufficiently weak privacy settings on unsuspecting user accounts to accumulate 50 million profiles. The app designer provided the data to Cambridge Analytica, the analytics and messaging firm controlled by Donald Trump allies.

Facebook reportedly asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the data in 2015, but did not verify that the deletion occurred. Cambridge Analytica subsequently received approximately $6 million from the Trump campaign to aid in its messaging and voter targeting. (The company had additional contracts worth millions of dollars with pro-Trump political action committees.)

We must keep in mind that this is playing out in the bigger context of the Russian interference scandal. This is why the scandal rocked the US as a whole. So because of shady practices (allowing a dev to exploit their data) Facebook is in a very delicate position. There will be exits, there will be “big plans to fight for privacy” but Facebook will survive. 

Why?

Even though WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton (who sold his company to Facebook for around $19B in 2014) tweeted it's time to #deletefacebook, what he doesn't realise is that for many people around the world, Facebook is the Internet (Indonesia is the 4th biggest Facebook population (and the world's 4th too)). Brian Acton also now works at Signal, a Facebook competitor.

So while a few privacy-conscious people from SF and NY will leave the service, utility-hungry people around the world are joining by millions. 

If you don't pay for the product, you are the the product. As long as we don't have a viable alternative, most of us are sticking with Facebook. Independently from the scandals and crises. 

[Source: The Daily Beast]