Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that an app was able to gain and then to manipulate the personal data of about 50 million Facebook users for a political purpose. Zuckerberg said, “We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward.”

Looming over this controversy is the entire world of modern social media.  In a way that even George Orwell and Aldous Huxley could not have foreseen in their worst nightmares, social media has lured millions and millions of us to surrender our own personal, private information to the world.

The most important thing to understand from this story is the two-edged sword of technology. Some technologies can bring about great good. Others bring about evil, but the reality is that even the most benign of technologies is still a technology that can almost always be misused.