Please recall that the vast majority of Facebook users are not from the US. I'm not sure the scandal has been that much publicized or that their global image has changed much to be honest.

Here in India it was on the front pages of most of the popular english newspapers.

My dad, who is 50+ years old, knew about Cambridge Analytica few months from now because of a documentary related to Donald Trump's win; he deleted his Facebook then and there.

However, I'm not sure that a majority of the people in India really care about the shady privacy permissions Facebook has slyly made them accept.

> the vast majority of Facebook users are not from the US

49% of Facebook's 2017 worldwide revenues came from the U.S. and Canada [1].

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680118... page 37

Yes but Facebook is driven by the network effect, and only 230M users are from the US, compared to the 2.2B global.

Americans are subsidising Facebook for the rest of the world? It seems like we should get more for our money.

You mean American corporations. American users aren't Facebook's customers.

All users are just product to Facebook.

It could well be that Facebook's American corporate customers are more interested in worldwide product than domestic product.

If they have more revenue per person in the US it doesn't mean that they are losing money in their international business.

My partner was born in Germany and most of her family still lives there so she keeps up with German news. She is under the impression that the scandal is getting more publicity and generating more outrage in Germany than it is here in Canada.

Here's the problem I see with this though.. One of the main values any social network provides is exploiting your network activity and social graph, and so it must be allowed into your personal/private sphere (at least to some degree).

And I use the word "exploiting" in a neutral sense here, because it can be good, in the sense of using all this data for your benefit to give you relevant and timely updates about your friends and surroundings, and let you know about things that interest you (i.e. why most people use Facebook today).

But, by its nature, that same data can also be used against you, exploited by marketers, advertisers, governments, etc..

So how do you get one without risking the other? How do you allow a social network to capture and analyze all this personal data about you - in order to return a valuable service - but then be totally (or reasonably) sure that your data will be protected and also not used against you?

Someone else mentioned HIPAA and other data protection laws that exist for medical data. I know regulation isn't a trendy topic in tech, but maybe there does need to be some clear codified rules about what companies can do with our personal/social data and what the consequences are for misuse or neglect.

Do you mean Facebook the platform or the company? The product has been slowly declining for a while now, losing (potential) users to Instagram. But since Instagram and Whatsapp belong to the same company, they likely won't collapse.

FB will acquire or crush any upcoming social networks. They actively watch out for any rising upstarts and have a lot of cash on hand.

The problem I see is that there is no money to be made in a social network that doesn't sell its users' data. It will require a fundamentally different business model (e.g., subscription based). Maybe a philanthropic model like Wikipedia. If any of the many billionaires on Earth donated a few billion to it, it could be self-funded forever.

> there is no money to be made in a social network that doesn't sell its users' data

There are plenty of decent business models between selling ads and pulling all stops to maximize ARPU [1]. Regulation could allow private social networks to flourish without abusing users or publishers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPU