Teflon Facebook?

There are two undeniable truths about Facebook, longtime analyst Nate Elliott says.

First, the company can’t go more than a couple of weeks without a negative privacy story. And “everyone forgets about those as soon as they are written,” Elliott says.

That’s true, at least, for Facebook’s users, who keep coming back despite the near-constant bad news about the company. It’s also true for advertisers, who’ve been propelling revenue to record levels. And it’s true, more or less, for investors, who tend to forgive and forget even when lawmakers, regulators and privacy activists don’t. Recently, Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging service was co-opted to deliver spyware to dozens of phones in targeted surveillance operations.

The discovery of the WhatsApp flaw came just as Facebook began outlining a private message-focused vision centered on bringing WhatsApp-like privacy features to its other messaging services.

In March, it came out that the company left millions of user passwords readable by its employees. Last fall, unknown attackers seized control of millions of user accounts. And there was Cambridge Analytica, when a data mining firm accessed the private information of 87 million users.

Sure, it looks bad, but looking at Facebook’s stock, you’d hardly know anything was amiss recently. Usage is growing, as is revenue. And Facebook is still expanding, growing its employee base 36 percent in the first quarter, to 37,773.

“The metrics look great for them,” said Elliott, who runs the research firm Nineteen Insights. “Why change something if the metrics look great?”