In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal that has rocked the public's trust in social media giant Facebook, the company's founder and CEO has unveiled even more information about the way in which Facebook interacts with its users' data.

Facebook Inc. scans the links and images that people send each other on Facebook Messenger and reads chats when they're flagged to moderators, making sure the content abides by the company's rules. If it doesn't, it gets blocked or taken down.

The company confirmed the practice after an interview published earlier this week with Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg raised questions about Messenger's practices and privacy.

© PCWorld

CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Vox's Ezra Klein a story about receiving a phone call related to ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Facebook had detected people trying to send sensational messages through the Messenger app, he said.

"In that case, our systems detect what's going on," Zuckerberg said. "We stop those messages from going through."

The company told Bloomberg that while Messenger conversations are private, Facebook scans them and uses the same tools to prevent abuse there that it does on the social network more generally. All content must abide by the same "community standards."

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While it's easy to say this is just another reason to ditch Facebook, it's worth considering how the lack of oversight on such communication platforms could be harmful. 

Messenger used to be part of Facebook; it was spun off into a separate application in 2014. Facebook's other major chat app, WhatsApp, encrypts both ends of its users' communications, so not even WhatsApp can see it. 

Facebook says it doesn't really read the contents of those chats, and that it doesn't use the data to target you with ads. On any given day, that should be enough from a tech company whom you trust. But how do we really know that's the case? Facebook has been under fire this year due to its failure to secure data of more than 50 million users that was further used by Cambridge Analytica to help out their political clients.