It’s Too Late to Stop Trusting Facebook

For the 30 million people affected by the social network’s latest breach, the consequences may be lifelong

Damon Beres
4 min readOct 12, 2018

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Photo by Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty

Years ago, before there were iPhones, smartwatches, or presidential tweets, I gave Facebook everything. And why not? I was a teenager, probably loaded on Busch Light and desperate to be “friended” by so many new people, their detailed profiles at my fingertips.

What seemed like an amazing promise when I signed up for Facebook in 2005 has become a crushing liability in 2018, when the world’s largest social network has by now suffered too many data breaches to remember. The latest, detailed by the company’s security team in a blog post on Friday, affected 30 million people. I’m one of them, and the prognosis is wrenching.

“Attackers” from an unknown source, with unknown motivations, were able to access the following information through my account:

  • My name
  • My email addresses
  • My phone number
  • My birthday
  • The fact that I’m married, and probably to whom
  • Where I’m from
  • Where I live now
  • Where I work
  • Where I went to school

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Damon Beres

Co-Founder and Former Editor in Chief, OneZero at Medium