Facebook kept the privacy headlines going yesterday when it acknowledged that “malicious actors have also abused [the platform] to scrape public profile information… given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way,” while Zuckerberg himself offered that “I would assume if you had that setting turned on that someone at some point has access to your public information in some way.” In short, the company acknowledged what I’ve said many times before – likely the entirety of Facebook’s two billion public profiles (and quite a few private profiles) are archived in repositories all over the world by academics, companies and criminal actors, not to mention countless governments. The big story was not Facebook’s confirmation of this, but rather why the company took until yesterday to confirm it.

Read full news article on Forbes.com