turned on, the president was asked are you thinking of switching him out for attorney general? and the president said, no, no, no, scott is doing a great job where he is. the president could still decide to fire jeff sessions tomorrow and replace him immediately with scott pruitt, who would be allowed to serve temporarily as attorney general, because he has already been confirmed by the senate for another job. with the scandal surrounding scott pruitt now, he could never be confirmed by the senate for another job, but he would be able to do what the president would want him to do as attorney general in one day. and that, of course, would be, firing special prosecutor robert mueller. there can be little doubt about scott pruitt s willingness to do that, singlce he seems to have ethical standards for how he conducts himself in his current job. he s under fire tonight for moving into a lobbyist s house when he arrived in washington and paying only $50 a night for his accommodation in the
political fire. hillary vaughn with the latest. facebook is admitting they have a massive data problem on their hands. it s not just the 87 million accounts they think were accessed through this cambridge analytical scandal. now the companies sing almost every facebook user has either public information information inappropriately accessed through future that allows people to find your public information. that is leaving every user vulnerable to identity theft and hacking. we looked into this and understood it more over the last few days as part of the audit of our overall system. if you have someone s phone number, you can put that in and you can get a link to their profile which pulls out public information. i certainly think that it s reasonable to expect that if you have best setting turned on, that it some point in the last several years, someone has probably accessed your public information. facebook says this feature has been disabled because they
dana: facebook data scandal just got more massive. mark zuckerberg upping the estimate of effective users from 50 million to 87 million. zuckerberg, who is scheduled to testify before congress next week, is taking some blame. everyone has a setting on facebook that controls. it s right in your privacy settings. whether or not people can look you up by your contact information. over the period of time that this feature has been around, people have been able to scrape public information. it is reasonable to expect that if you had that setting turned on, that at some point in the last several years, someone has probably accessed your public information. dana: alexander smith is executive director of america risi rising. michael hopkins is a contributor to the hill. this is gearinging up to be a
starting monday, if you re a facebook user, you ll find out if you are among the 87 million people whose personal data may have been improperly shared with cambridge analytica. anna shekter is with me as well, nbc news producer, a big thanks to all of you. anna, i know you were on this call yesterday with mark zuckerberg. this is one of the things he said i find found interesting. take a listen. i think the thing that people should assume, i mean, just given this is a feature that s been available for a while, a lot of people use it for the right way, but there is also we ve seen some scraping. i would assume that if you had that setting turned on, someone at some point had access to the information. what is zuckerberg talking
also turned it off. if you have someone s phone number, you can put it in and get, you know, a link to their profile, which pulls up public information. i certainly think that that it is reasonable to expect that if you had that setting turned on, that at some point in the last several years, um, someone has probably accessed your public information. here s what i want to happen. i want someone to ask mark zuckerberg, does he have that setting on? does sheryl shorthaandberg have setting on? he paused and said, well, most people have that on. if it is a risk, if people don t understand the information they re letting out, i think it s most likely ethical to let them know. that setting was on by default. it is stuff people are sadly learning about their behavior on facebook. on monday, facebook will inform users if their data may have been shared. it ll appear as a link at the top of your news feed. look for it. a feature appearing just one day before ceo mark zuckerberg is