and now for your non-mueller news break

 Facebook tried to bury a massive privacy scandal during Mueller madness
5:35 p.m.

 
Loic Venance/Getty Images

  Sure, the Mueller report dropped today. And sure, it's a few hours before a holiday weekend. But Facebook has a bit of unfortunate news to share with you.

 Remember last month, when Facebook said it stored a whole bunch of passwords in plain text when they should have been encrypted, potentially affecting "tens of thousands" of Instagram users? Yeah, it quietly updated that blog post Thursday to say it's more like "millions of Instagram users."

 In the blog post first unveiled last month, Facebook said it would tell "hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users" and "tens of millions of other Facebook users" that their passwords were stored in an unencrypted database available to 20,000 Facebook employees. Now, a few more Instagram users get to join the fun. Facebook said it found "no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed the passwords," though given the site's very shaky past year, that's not too reassuring.

 The news comes just a few hours after Facebook told Business Insider that it collected email contacts from 1.5 million users who signed up after May 2016 and "unintentionally uploaded" them to Facebook. The addresses were collected when users typed in their email passwords to verify the addresses they'd signed up with. Facebook didn't tell these users their email contacts would be imported into the site, but there was no way to opt out of the upload or cancel it once it began. Facebook said those contacts were "used to improve Facebook's ad targeting," Business Insider writes in yet another reassuring addition to Facebook's track record.

Kathryn Krawczyk  The Week Magazine

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So, yet another damned privacy screwup by Facebook.  I should just yawn, but I can't because this crap is never-ending and might just hurt some people over time …