Facebook Pandora’s Box is now open too far - OPINIONIT is difficult to feel much sympathy for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has seen the value of his company plunge by billions of pounds in the past week.

The phenomenon that has been Facebook has been halted in its tracks following recent revelations that the personal data of 50m people has been accessed by the political firm Cambridge Analytica, itself at the heart of scandal involving potential bribery and entrapment during election campaigns.

The breach occurred when a university professor, Aleksandr Kogan, used a personality quiz on Facebook. More than 250,000 people took the quiz (how we love learning about ourselves in such a way!) but - through each person's online contacts - they unwittingly allowed Professor Kogan to obtain data from 50m Facebook users.

Mr Zuckerberg has apologised for his company's part in the scandal, although not before more than £35bn was wiped off Facebook's value.

"This was a major breach of trust and I'm really sorry that this happened," the 33-year-old billionaire founder of Faceboook said. "We have a basic responsibility to protect people's data and if we can't do that then we don't deserve the opportunity to serve people." Too right, Zuck, as surely millions of people will have uttered when they heard his apology.

As a very reluctant Facebook account holder (I post virtually nothing), the social media obsession - as it is for so many people - has largely passed me by.

I cannot understand some people's apparently irresistible urge to lay their lives bare on web-based platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like. Oversharing - sometimes hilariously so - has become the order of the day for people who ought to know better; and the alacrity with which they leap to their keyboards to inform the wider world of their innermost thoughts and problems has facilitated the scandal which is proving so harmful to Facebook.

Analogies about George Orwell's dystopian 1984 have flowed thick and fast in the wake of the past week's revelations. Facebook has been exposed as something akin to - if not even more all-seeing than - Big Brother, as one man, Mr Zuckerberg, finds himself in control of the personal information of a staggering two billion people worldwide. Now that is power. Until the events of recent days, Mr Z was being touted as a future US president - a field which is becoming ever-more crowded with celebrities.

Personality-wise, he's certainly no Oprah Winfrey (another A-lister being hailed as a future president). With his ubiquitous uniform of a grey T-shirt and his geeky haircut, he's more like a young John Major when it comes to charisma. But, boy, is he powerful.

The leviathan that Facebook became did so because so many of us blindly rushed to sign up - and to implicitly surrender much of our privacy.

I don't understand algorithms or anything else that goes with the web - but I do understand the concept of there being no such thing as a free lunch. Facebook may be free to join and use - but a company doesn't become worth billions on the back of nothing. It becomes worth billions because of its use to advertisers. Every click and share on Facebook builds up a profile of the user which advertisers can then target and exploit.

And it was only ever going to be a short leap from that to the likes of Cambridge Analytica being able to harvest people's preferences and prejudices, in order to target them for political campaigners' ends.

But the real danger of Facebook and other social media platforms is the unregulated way in which news (and all too often non-news) is disseminated - and believed.

Millions of people actually use Facebook news feeds as their way of learning what is going on in the world. And yet Facebook is no news agency. As Brian Appleyard, writing in the Sunday Times this week, so aptly put it: "Going to Facebook for your news is like going to B&Q for your milk."

When people start getting their so-called news in sound bites; when social media platforms are exploited by all and sundry with dubious agendas; when suggestible minds can be manipulated and exploited by invisible others; when one young man can control the personal information of billions of people - well, Big Brother truly is among us. And that cannot be good for society. We have given our precious privacy away far too easily since the advent of social media. Sadly, I fear Pandora's Box is now open too far for the damage to be undone. One good thing may yet come from the scandal: surely Mr Zuckerberg will never become president of the United States.