Facebook's Present Is as Scary as Its Checkered Past

The fresh disclosures about the Cambridge Analytica affair are dismaying for Facebook Inc., and they were getting a lot of deserved attention on Wednesday. But what happened at the shadowy political consulting firm is largely about Facebook's past. The company made other changes Wednesday that highlighted how lax it is currently being in allowing access to information from the social network's 2 billion users.

The big news, of course, was that Facebook gave its first estimate of the number of accounts that may have fallen into the hands of Cambridge Analytica, a firm that worked on Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Facebook said that number was as high as 87 million people, mostly in the U.S., which was larger than previous media reports that suggested the firm had harvested private information from Facebook profiles of more than 50 million people. (Even the 87 million figure is just an estimate. Cambridge Analytica denied on Wednesday that it had received data on that many people.)