Facebook’s data scandal is the perfect example of this social media behemoth prioritizing growth and its subsequent billions of dollars over security and privacy.

Just to be clear, Facebook was not breached per say. The US researcher who started the whole episode in 2013 had no nefarious intentions. He created a personality-quiz app — the kind that offers to test your IQ, reveals your inner personality, etc. Around 300,000 Facebook users responded to the quiz, but that gave the researcher access to those people’s Facebook friends as well, producing details on 50 million users. The political consultancy Cambridge Analytica then accessed that user information to build profiles on American voters that were later used to help elect US President Donald Trump in 2016, going against Facebook’s rules.

Facebook wasn’t hacked by Cambridge Analytica or anyone else. It’s true that the Facebook friends had not agreed to share their information, and Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data, as Facebook had asked. However, Facebook very graciously gave this data away, trusting naively that it wouldn’t be used for malign purposes.

It is highly unlikely that maneuvers on Facebook helped get Trump elected. It’s hard to imagine that a significant percentage of his die-hard base would have deserted him for some anti-Trump Internet material. The same would hold true of his rival candidate Hillary Clinton. Web messaging can only go so far.

What most definitely happened is that Facebook has created a platform while taking no responsibility for what happens on it. There are no data protection rules governing Facebook, making it accountable to no-one.

Because Facebook has the ability to build detailed and sophisticated profiles on users' likes, dislikes, lifestyles and political leanings, it makes millions of dollars every day selling its users’ personal information, and there is very little to be done about it.

As part of his apology, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook planned to conduct an investigation of thousands of apps that have used Facebook’s platform, restrict developer access to data, and give members a tool that lets them to disable access to their Facebook data more easily.

But Zuckerberg’s protection plans would go directly against what Facebook is all about. There is no way to use a platform like Facebook and not expose oneself to the sort of rupture of data which happened because security and privacy directly contradict Facebook’s business model. It can target advertising in a way no other site can because it tracks users across the web and therefore knows much more about its users than anyone else. So protecting private data is contrary to Facebook’s whole raison d’etre.

Zuckerberg said he was open to additional government regulation but Facebook has often resisted regulatory oversight, for good reason. Its entire business model depends upon access to and distribution of private personal data. It is, after all, a corporation and its profits are tied to being able to gather this data. So Facebook will probably not do anything meaningful to either self-regulate or have an outside party do it.

In wake of the scandal, it is doubtful many will delete their Facebook accounts. Facebook is too much a part of people’s lives. The less drastic option is deactivation but those who take that route time and time again do not show enough willpower to stay too far away from Facebook and usually return.

People do not really have much of an understanding of the various ways in which their data is being collected. They almost certainly have no idea how much Facebook knows about them or how their private data can be used in disreputable ways. Facebook doesn’t really care. Facebook is in the business of making money, much of it through surveillance. It harvests data, and that data has and can and will be misused.