Facebook says new bug allowed apps access to private photos of up to 6.8m users

Sure, but first, be more conscious of what your data means:

• if there are private photos or other files on a device and there also is a proprietary program, app or otherwise, with access to them, they are not private
  • like if you have some meat and and a cat in some place, the chances that the kitty is vegan or vegetarian is very low, no? so the meat is not safe
• companies gather data about you and sell them, this is a problem not because other people see it but because the data yielded can be and is used to purposefully manipulate you, by experts in such activity
  • like it's not the end of the world if people know you're ticklish or allergic to dogs, but a database of ticklish and/or allergic people can be exploited both for commercial and political purposes

I know that you, koan, in particular are probably not ignorant of these, but I wanted to append this to your comment so that those who don't and could think that deleting your facebook is good enough for your privacy. The following is a possibly incomplete list of what to do:

• avoid social media apps
  • use browser versions instead
    • which at least cannot access your files etc directly
• avoid most social media
  • none is hard, e.g. for me WhatsApp is not practically avoidable, but I don't use any other corporate social media
• use tracking protection
  • block JavaScript
  • block other nuisances like tracking pixels
  • while at it just block large media items
  • block ads
    • as long as the ad services people use are unethical, blocking ads is totally ethical
• optionally tell other people about these steps and the above rationale

The "such as" in the quoted sentence concerns me, since it implies that they're leaving out some of the types of photos that were accessible. Did they intentionally avoid mentioning some of the more frightening types? For example, were photos sent through private messages accessible? Of course people shouldn't be sending sensitive photos through Facebook messages, but they absolutely do.

My family was using Google messenger. Now that it's getting killed off, we're all switching over to Discord. Granted, we're a technology-oriented family and third party clients like Discord can be a hard sell for a lot of people (despite FB technically being a third party client itself).

We can all talk about how difficult life would be without FB, or we can just stop using it. It's a vicious cycle in that it's difficult to stop using it because people won't stop using it. It also seems to me that the necessity of FB is seriously overblown in an era when virtually every person has a smart phone. I think people just don't want to admit that they like using FB more than they care about online security.