“I led Facebook's efforts to fix privacy problems on its developer platform in advance of its 2012 initial public offering. What I saw from the inside was a company that prioritized data collection from its users over protecting them from abuse. As the world contemplates what to do about Facebook in the wake of its role in Russia's election meddling, it must consider this history. Lawmakers shouldn't allow Facebook to regulate itself. Because it won‘t.”

— Sandy Parakilas, operations manager at Facebook in 2011-12, in a New York Times Op-Ed, “We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself,” from last November. Since then, the Cambridge Analytica story has broken. Almost as big a story has been Facebook's non-response. Mark Zuckerberg is supposed to “break silence” on the controversy today, but it already feels too late.