The article “Why You Shouldn’t Use Facebook to Log in to Other Sites” written by Farhad Manjoo and published by the New York Times discusses the dangers and risks of using the convenient “log in with Facebook” feature that many websites, apps, and more all have today.

Last week, Facebook announced that there had been a security breach that allowed hackers to reach the profiles and personal information of at least 50,000,000 users. Not only did it give the hackers access to your facebook accounts, but it also gave them access to any other app that you used your Facebook account to log into. That’s right- Do you remember when you first downloaded Instagram and it gave you the “sign up with Facebook” option instead of entering your email and making up a password? Yes, because you chose to do this, hackers now may have access to your Instagram, Spotify, Pinterest, and many more social media websites with the feature.

This is obviously dangerous in terms of people’s privacy and personal information. However, Facebook’s Vice President of product management, Guy Rosen, said that there was “no evidence” that hackers got into other sites during the breach.

There is still a great chance that this could happen, however, and Manjoo is suggesting other options in terms of how you log into these websites. He says the best way to protect your privacy is to use a password manager such as 1Passwordnor LastPass. These services are specially designed to create strong and unique passwords and will remember them for future use.

This topic impacts the mass communications world because nowadays, social media is one of the biggest factors in our lives and is being used to create and find jobs. The main problem is the risk of having your information taken from you by hackers to be used negatively. It is important we keep aware that things such as hacking are possible and are happening very often. We must be cautious as to what we post on the web, as well as what information we are giving these websites access to.