Facebook rules the world

It used to be the thinking that if the government/police/health service/car tax license people etc all knew about your personal details such as bank account, address, age, family etc etc that was acceptable in this day and age. Only criminals need worry. So if you're a respectable citizen without even a speeding fine to your name, all is great and fine. Then along came Facebook and all the other social media organisations and suddenly everything that you thought was closely guarded is now open to the world, including gangsters, fraudsters, scammers, hackers, hijackers, pollsters, strangers, relentless companies selling their wares, governments trying to buy your votes, schemers, enemies and anyone else you can think of. Privacy is a thing of the past. Now you wonder whether "they" - whoever they might be - know so much about you, you could wake up one morning and find your bank has been emptied, your novel manuscript has been stolen, your brand new Jaguar has been replaced by an old jallopy and your two-storey house has been turned into a bungalow. This is all exaggerated of course but I suspect most people will understand what I mean. As someone who recently has been targeted by the most alarming scammer penetrating my laptop I have become less sure of the nice feeling that. provided I behave lawfully in all I do, I can carry on my life without disturbance. Facebook has a lot of explaining to do after the scandal of the Cambridge Analytica firm's ability to exploit 50 million American Facebook addresses to try and sway the US presidential election in 2016. So now Trump won thanks not just to the Russians but also to the social media platform that we all love and use.