Half a billion Facebook users were hacked. Should we care about yet another data breach?

Facebook is embroiled in yet another data privacy scandal. The data was breached in 2019, but the public recently learned about it after Business Insider reported that hackers stole private information — including phone numbers, email addresses, full names, and locations — from more than 533 million accounts. That personal data from users worldwide is now on the dark web.

But after years of headlines of big data breaches, how much of a cause for concern is the breach?

“There is an opportunity right now to be part of a systemic response to surveillance and big tech and monopoly more broadly. … We're on the same side as the people who are angry about a Facebook breach. So we need systemic responses, anti-monopoly responses, and you do that through organizations,” says Cory Doctorow, a journalist and special advisor for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to defending civil liberties in the digital world.