Privacy Fears Weigh On Facebook With Earnings Ahead

Facebook reports quarterly results Wednesday as it grapples with a data privacy scandal that strikes at how the huge social network makes money from what it knows about people

San Francisco, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 25th Apr, 2018 ) :Facebook reports quarterly results Wednesday as it grapples with a data privacy scandal that strikes at how the huge social network makes money from what it knows about people.

The earnings release comes just two weeks after Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg faced questioning in two congressional panels about revelations that personal data was harvested on 87 million users by Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy working for Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.

Whether the scandal is taking a toll on membership or advertising at the online social network was not likely to be revealed in earnings numbers from the first three months of this year, but hints might be found in the company's financial forecast.

Using information about people's lives to target advertising is a standard internet business model, and any effort to rein it in could ripple through the industry. A freshly released eMarketer report downplayed the threat that the scandal could cause an exodus from Facebook.

"Facebook is so large that it would take a lot of user defections to make a difference," eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson said in the report.