Facebook has had a rough week.
The social media giant has seen a 10 percent drop in their stock value, they've had three major companies pull their advertisements for now and 37 attorneys wrote to Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying they are "profoundly concerned."
Let's start with two names you may have heard thrown around: "Cambridge analytica" and "Global Science Research."
Cambridge is a data analysis company. They gathered info from sites like Facebook and supplied that information to business and political clients. Cambridge hired GSR to gather certain information for them from Facebook users that they then supplied to those clients.
Plenty of companies do these things, but it was the way that GSR did what they did that has folks concerned.
GSR had users of certain apps and programs "opt-in" to share their Facebook information. What the organization didn't disclose was that it "seeded" the accounts of those who opted-in. Essentially, the company took the small number of people who willingly shared their information and then were able to scrape info from all their contacts and connections.
The New York Times revealed that 50 million Facebook users were impacted. The data was used and sold to companies - even the campaigns of President Trump, as well as Senator Cruz and Ben Carson.
"This has been brewing. This is not something that started last week," UT Professor and Social Media Expert Dr. Angeline Close Scheinbaum said."
Scheinbaum wrote a book called "The Dark Side of Social Media," and said this fiasco is an example.
"We want to think that our data is being used in a beneficial way or that it's not going to be mind at all, but that's not the reality," she said.
Facebook executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, have publicly apologized and said they'd do better at earning the public's trust and keeping their data safe.
Scheinbaum said the whole conflict highlights some flaws in how we use technology.
"We trust the opt-in setting or we presume that it will be handled in a respectful way," Scheinbaum said. "We have this false sense of security with our data, that there's going to be someone who will have corporate social responsibility and will step up and regulate what's going on."