Quote:Precocious and confident, Facebook is a lot like other 15-year-olds.

Do you remember where you were when it all began?

We’re talking about your social media account. Launching your own profile into the cybersphere for the first time was a demarcation point for many of us, creating a “before” and “after.” And while there’s a handful of widely popular social sites, Facebook is the grand poobah of the lodge. The company estimates its total number of monthly users to be about 2.32 billion; and it ended 2018 on a high note, reporting a 4th quarter profit of $6.7 billion.

Which brings us to the 6.7-billion-dollar question: How is Facebook maintaining a still-climbing popularity amidst scandal after controversy after scandal?

A big part of the answer is because those 2.32 billion people opt to focus on the positive aspects of the social site — reconnecting with old friends, keeping up with faraway family, and having an instant soapbox/stump/stage for any message you’d like to transmit to the world (or at least your contacts). These benefits, which can be enjoyed every day, seem to outweigh the more abstract fear of data theft.

In the face of Facebook’s comically long litany of scandals in recent years, not least of which was the notorious Cambridge Analytica controversy where 87 million users had their personal data collected without their permission, Avast suggests that if you enjoy playing on the social site, you take measures to protect your data and your privacy by doing the following:

Take a few minutes to get familiar with the Facebook Basic Privacy Settings & Tools. Adjust your own settings to your comfort level.

View and manage your Facebook Data. It is worth educating yourself on what pictures, chat messages and other data Facebook knows about you. You can then decide to remove any content that you don’t want stored.