Who do you want as the next Scotland manager?

We asked and you told us.

Watch here

Watch my #Clipisode: "Sportscene Extra – Scotland Manager"
https://t.co/E28dfSrlIi

— Jonathan Sutherland (@BBCjsutherland) February 8, 2018

Our Top Ten Revealed experts @josemangin @EddieTrunk @KevinBlatt @lyndseyparker @PeteGiovine made a Webisode highlighting their favorite guitarists to get you excited for the show!

Set your DVR for the premiere SUNDAY –> https://t.co/G9JlpvAoAA pic.twitter.com/Izqc1wu3Zv

— AXS TV (@AXSTV) February 10, 2018

It’s hard to tell the difference between the real and fake IDs in this shot. Photo: Veriff

My dad, brother, and I are now doing a monthly book club together. One of us chooses a book, we all read it, and then we do an hour-long video conference and talk about it. We’ve done this for about six months now and it’s wonderful.

A few months ago Daniel chose Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race by Debby Irving. It was a powerful book that started off strong.

“I can think of no bigger misstep in American history than the invention and perpetuation of the idea of white superiority. It allows white children to believe they are exceptional and entitled while allowing children of color to believe they are inferior and less deserving. Neither is true; both distort and stunt development. Racism crushes spirits, incites divisiveness, and justifies the estrangement of entire groups of individuals who, like all humans, come into the world full of goodness, with a desire to connect, and with boundless capacity to learn and grow. Unless adults understand racism, they will, as I did, unknowingly teach it to their children.

No one alive today created this mess, but everyone alive today has the power to work on undoing it. Four hundred years since its inception, American racism is all twisted up in our cultural fabric. But there’s a loophole: people are not born racist. Racism is taught, and racism is learned. Understanding how and why our beliefs developed along racial lines holds the promise of healing, liberation, and the unleashing of America’s vast human potential.”

I found myself nodding many times as I read this book. When I finished, I wandered around the web and found this TEDx Fenway talk by the author which does a great job of a high-level summary of the book.

I particularly liked this framing:

 

“What I’ve learned is that thinking myself raceless allowed for a distorted frame of reference built on faulty beliefs. For instance, I used to believe:

Dad, Daniel, and I talked extensively about the notion of “Good intentions, bad information.” While it applies to many situations, it’s especially key in applying critical thinking to a complex, or deeply challenging situation, especially one where there is a visceral bias (emotional or intellectual) that appears. Consider applying Curiosity, Courage, and Tolerance by doing the following.

There’s a lot more in the book that both challenged me and helped me. I’m sure I interpreted plenty of it wrong, but, in the same way that I’m reading and exploring a lot of feminist literature, I’m going to include explorations of race and ethnicity in the stuff I’m reading.

Daniel – thanks for choosing Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race as one of our monthly books.

Also published on Medium.

Customers at a CVS store and pharmacy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 4. Reuters

The short version of what happened to CVS in 2018 is this: The company got too greedy, and then it got caught.

In its greed, the company squeezed independent mom-and-pop pharmacies. The squeezing wasn't being done by the part of CVS you buy dental floss from or visit to pick up a prescription, though it's not unrelated. It's a behind-the-scenes business known as a pharmacy benefit manager, which manages payments between insurers and pharmacies and drug companies.

The mom-and-pop pharmacies say CVS' in-house pharmacy benefit manager, CVS Caremark, slashed reimbursements for medications sold to their patients on Medicaid. At the same time, they say, it was reimbursing CVS pharmacies at much better rates. With some of them on the verge of going out of business, these pharmacies have rallied lawmakers — both Democrats and Republicans — to put an end to this.

So now CVS faces a tide of resistance to the way it deals with smaller rivals. Already, Arkansas legislators have passed a law aimed at curbing this behavior. This is new regulation in a Republican-dominated state. That's how bad things looked to the lawmakers.

Ohio is forcing PBMs to disclose more about the way their pricing and contracts work. Mom-and-pop pharmacists in states like Texas and Kentucky are realizing they have a CVS problem on their hands too. Caremark manages payment for Medicaid-managed care plans in more than 20 states.

This is important because CVS is trying to cut a $68 billion deal to buy a health insurer, Aetna — a deal that would make it even more powerful and more able to obscure the whys and hows of pricing all through the healthcare system.

What's more, CVS isn't the only healthcare company trying to turn into a leviathan. Over the past few years the largest healthcare companies — including insurers, PBMs, hospitals, and drug companies — have been combining in what is known as vertical integration, or mergers between companies in the same industry whose businesses don't directly compete.

They say this is an effort to create efficiency in the healthcare system. What CVS has shown, though, is that this kind of integration can actually get companies drunk on pricing power, and create monopolistic monsters.

In Arkansas

To their credit, once legislators in Arkansas figured out what was happening to local pharmacies, they moved at blinding speed.

The state legislature nearly unanimously passed a bill designed to curb this behavior from PBMs on March 14.

The situation had gotten desperate, fast. The way mom-and-pop pharmacists tell it, CVS started bringing the pain at the beginning of 2018. Suddenly, reimbursement rates for Medicaid plummeted at the same time drug prices for Medicaid started rising. So in the beginning of February, Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge started investigating the matter.

"The amount paid to the pharmacy was less than half of what was being charged to the plans," Scott Pace, of the Arkansas Pharmacists Association, told Business Insider.

Pharmacists in Arkansas, for example, say:

For a Fentanyl Patch 100, CVS pharmacies were reimbursed $400.65 while mom-and-pop pharmacies were reimbursed $75.74.

For Amoxicillin, CVS pharmacies were reimbursed $35.92 while mom-and-pop pharmacies were reimbursed $12.21.

For even something as simple as Ibuprofen, CVS pharmacies were reimbursed $5.86 while mom-and-pop pharmacies were reimbursed $1.39.

Sometimes, the pharmacists say, they weren't reimbursed enough to cover the cost of filling the prescription. These aren't the only ones, to be clear. Business Insider has seen a long list of alleged disparities like the ones above.

CVS, for its part, denies that it is squeezing the mom and pops. Business Insider sent the above examples to the company, and its spokeswoman Christine Cramer said they were patently wrong. However, she also said the pharmacists were "cherry-picking" reimbursements that look especially bad.

"The facts are that on an aggregate basis, we reimburse independent pharmacies at a higher rate than larger regional and national chains," she said.

"CVS Caremark considers local, independently owned pharmacies to be important partners in creating our pharmacy networks, and in fact, independent pharmacies account for nearly 40% of our network," she added. "Furthermore, we reimburse our participating network pharmacies, including the many independent pharmacies that are valued participants in our network, at competitive rates that balance the need to fairly compensate pharmacies while providing a cost-effective benefit for our clients."

This response did not jibe with what legislators, patients, and pharmacists were seeing on the ground, though.

Out of a $50 drug, for example, say $22 was paid to the mom and pop, the rest went to CVS — to its PBM. At the same time, patients looking at how much a drug cost their health plan in their explanation-of-benefits portal would show a price of, say, $100.

"The numbers were stark," Pace said.

Here's the letter pharmacists are getting, urging them to sell their businesses to CVS. Business Insider So until this was all figured out, people who bought medicines at their local pharmacies in Arkansas (and Ohio) didn't know that their neighbors were getting screwed. They also didn't know that, as their local pharmacists were getting squeezed, CVS was waiting in the wings, sending out letters offering to buy the very mom-and-pop shops it was forcing out of business.

One pharmacist, Rick Pennington of Lonoke, Arkansas, said that if it weren't for his business mailing a generic erectile-dysfunction pill to nine states, he'd be out of business.

"When you look at who's controlling the money and who has the leverage, it's the PBMs who have control," Pace told Business Insider. "These folks are trying to get more integrated into the healthcare system, and so far we've seen that means patients lose. Next, they'll buy a hospital and be an HMO. I think that's bad for patient choice."

He added: "It's not a free market because there is no transparency on pricing."

CVS, however, denies coordination between its PBM and its pharmacies.

"Our retail business has engaged in acquisition activity and outreach to other pharmacies since well before CVS and Caremark merged, and, in fact, the communications materials related to this activity has been relatively unchanged over the years," Cramer said. "Any retail acquisition activity is completely unrelated to, separated from, and not coordinated in any way with the PBM business' management of its pharmacy network."

In Ohio

The story for pharmacists in Ohio is a bit different. There, some have viewed CVS as problematic for years, but instead of seeing reimbursement rates plunge, legislators and pharmacists said they've been moving up and down like crazy since around 2015. By October or November of last year, gross annual margins for Medicaid payments to mom and pops were going below zero, and pharmacists were losing money on most drugs sold.

"Because those rates are set arbitrarily you're set up for a roller-coaster ride," Antonio Ciaccia of the Ohio Pharmacists Association said in a phone interview with Business Insider. "No one expects to get rich off Medicaid ... but if you sat down with a pharmacist that was willing to tell you, 'Here's what I was getting paid,' you could match it up with state-utilization data and see the spread and how significant the loss was... That's what kind of lit everything up in Ohio."

There was also the suspicion that Medicaid was being overcharged. One legislator, after being briefed on what was going on by Ohio's Medicaid agency, said simply, "We're getting hosed."

And of course, CVS sent those letters soliciting acquisitions. One came on November 9 of last year, a particularly bad time for the state's mom-and-pop pharmacists.

Suddenly, the number of people in Ohio government demanding answers, led by Ohio Speaker Cliff Rosenberger, started to multiply. They realized that the Ohio Department of Medicaid wasn't even asking for the right pricing data, and CVS had never considered giving it to them. Now, as rules change within the department, it'll have to.

Brad Miller, Rosenberger's press secretary, said this was something his boss had been looking into for years.

"In order to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars, you must have access to reliable and accurate data," he said. "Around the state, we are seeing the negative impact the current system is having on local, independent pharmacies, many of which have been forced to close in recent years. This, in turn, reduces patients' treatment options and access to care. Having access to this data will go a long way toward lowering prescription-drug costs for patients and employers, as well as help reduce the burden on Ohio taxpayers."

Ciaccia told Business Insider that the the three year CVS has been engaging in this behavior it has gained 68 pharmacies in the state. Competitor Walgreens, on the other hand, has only added 2 locations over the same period.

"We are done messing around in Ohio," he said. "This system is completely broken ... It is layered and layered with conflicts of interest. I don't care who the PBM is."

What a tailor can do!

Health Strategies Group PBMs have all sorts of tricks up their sleeves to make money not just from pharmacists, but also from insurers and drug companies — basically anyone involved in getting medicine to you.

Here are a few of their greatest hits:

We've been learning about this slowly. Three PBMs — CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and UnitedHealth Group — control about 70% of the US market, and they guard their secrets zealously. Recently, though, the news site Axios published a contract template for Express Scripts. No two contracts are alike, and Express Scripts grumbled that the one Axios published (which was rife with loopholes to make Express Scripts money at every turn) was old and irrelevant.

Yet the company demanded that DocumentCloud, where the contract was posted, immediately take it down, citing copyright infringement.

This "Oh it doesn't matter to our business — but 'DON'T TOUCH THAT!'" response is trending in PBM world.

For example, earlier this month the US Senate introduced the Patient Right to Know Drug Prices Act, which would ban the so-called gag clauses mentioned above, just like Arkansas lawmakers did.

The Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, the PBM lobby, responded to that by saying:

"We support the patient always paying the lowest cost at the pharmacy counter, whether it's the cash price or the copay. This is standard industry practice in both Medicaid and the commercial sector. We would oppose contracting that prohibits drugstores from sharing with patients the cash price they charge for each drug. These rates are set entirely at the discretion of each pharmacy and can vary significantly from drugstore to drugstore."

Sounds as if they're for it, right? Wrong. Here's the next sentence.

"Fortunately, to the degree this issue was ever rooted in more than anecdotal information, it has been addressed in the marketplace."

Rep. Earl "Buddy" Carter of Georgia. C-Span, screenshot So which is it, guys? Do you think transparency is important and support patient rights — or are you going to fight this bill?

It's a simple question. And it's easy to see the answer.

Rep. Buddy Carter, a Georgia Republican, introduced the Prescription Transparency Act to the US House of Representatives this month. It does basically the same thing as the Senate bill, and, as the only pharmacist in Congress, he knows he's facing a street fight from the PBM lobby.

"They spent $600,000 against me when I first ran for office three years ago to try to get me defeated, and over the past few years we've seen them ramp up their political activity," Carter told Business Insider. He's also noticed that legislators in Washington are finally waking up to the urgency of this situation. There have been hearings about drug pricing in both houses, and Scott Gottlieb, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, has come out swinging especially hard, saying that the PBMs sit at the top of a "rigged system."

"We've seen some companies that dropped the PBMs such as Caterpillar and they've been able to control drug prices," Carter said in a phone interview. "Right now the focus is on prescription drug pricing, and the most impact we can have on pricing is to have control on transparency from the PBMs."

If you believe that, you should also believe taking that control won't be easy. Once we do, though, it may change the way you look at what our healthcare is trying to become.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son with US President Donald Trump. Brendan McDermid/Reuters

When Business Insider recently asked one prominent European fund manager what he thought about SoftBank, he raised his eyebrows and said: "It's a spaceship."

The Japanese telecoms giant, and specifically its $100 billion (£71 billion) Vision Fund, has rewritten the rules of venture capital over the past 12 months, and investors and startups are still adjusting.

The Vision Fund is essentially a gigantic corporate venture fund that drops huge amounts of money into both well-established tech firms and promising startups. The amount of money it has at its disposal is unprecedented, and has shifted the dynamics of venture funding around the world.

SoftBank has taken an 17.5% stake in Uber, and dropped $502 million into Improbable, a UK gaming software firm. It's also active in Asia, with a stake in Indian Uber rival Ola.

According to a new report from tech consultancy Delta Partners, seen by Business Insider, SoftBank kickstarted a trend last year of funding mega-rounds — which benefited late-stage companies but put a serious squeeze on seed-stage financing.

In other words, it became a lot harder for early startups to raise funding.

Here's a chart — you can see the global number of deals in 2017 was down, with particular impact on the seed stage. That means early-stage startups found it tougher to raise venture funding.

Delta Partners

And here's another set of charts showing that growth-stage companies are getting a bigger piece of the funding pie:

Delta Partners

The data reflects real-world worries around early-stage funding.

Young startups are a naturally risky place to put your money — they're not making much revenue, and maybe haven't worked out whether there's even much demand for whatever they are building. Unsurprisingly, investors are averse to that risk, so it falls to specialist early-stage funds and individual angel investors to get these firms going.

One British seed investor told Business Insider this week that, with the UK's economy lagging, there's anecdotal evidence to suggest angels are putting their money somewhere other than startups. And the crash in early-stage funding clearly isn't just limited to the UK, as shown by Delta Partners' data and other reports.

SoftBank, and the rise of big corporate funds, points to a trend of more money going into dominant players, such as Uber and office-sharing company WeWork, who might "win" their entire market. They represent a safer bet — if anything in tech can be considered safe.

Delta Partners

Delta Partners predicted in its report that early stage funding will recover, and that Asia and Europe will have a role to play here. But it looks like the megafunds and their megarounds are here to stay.

Maximilian Teodorescu captured an image of Tiangong-1 passing in front of the sun.Courtesy of Maximilian Teodorescu

The bus-sized Chinese space station Tiangong-1, known as "Heavenly Palace," is whipping around our planet in the final hours before it burns into Earth's atmosphere. In the very near future, it will break up, with some of its debris likely falling to Earth.

In these final hours, Maximilian Teodorescu, a scientific researcher with the National Institute for Lasers and Plasma in Bucharest, Romania, was able to photograph Tiangong-1 as it made a transit passing in front of the sun.

In Teodorescu's photo above, you can see the space station's transit.

An illustration of China's Tiangong-1 modular space station orbiting Earth.Aerospace Corporation

This photo is likely one of the last times Tiangong-1 will be seen before its journey, which began when it was launched in 2011, comes to an end on or around Easter Sunday (April 1).

Teodorescu told Business Insider that he's been interested in astronomy for about two decades now. His interest starting with science fiction before he moved on to real-life space programs.

"It is fascinating still for me to know that humans are trying to get out of their perfect habitat down here on Earth and try to find other habitable worlds in our Solar System and beyond. It's perhaps the most important era of the Human Civilization," Teodorescu said in an email.

"And the still small steps we take, like the ISS and other space stations, are proof that this part of our evolution is occurring right now. And I must take advantage of this moment, and at least image these technical marvels, if not be a part of the programs. This is why I try to catch any close transit in front of the Moon or Sun whenever I can."

Follow the station's pass-by in the GIF below.

The Tiangong-1 modular space station is expected to fall to Earth in a fiery blaze.

But at the moment, it's just one of about 23,000 other human-made objects larger than a softball zooming around the planet.

China stopped using the two-room, 9.4-ton vessel, in June of 2013. The Chinese program lost touch with Tiangong-1 — its first space station — in March of 2016. The station is now losing forward speed, which means that gravity is pulling it towards Earth faster and faster, with the air around it too thin to slow it down.

But as it enters the atmosphere, the situation will change.

When the spacecraft falls into thicker air, the drag will begin to rip off solar panels, antennas, and other loosely attached pieces. Superheated plasma will heat the vessel to thousands of degrees, melting and disintegrating it.

Little will survive. Even though there are layers of protective material and substances like titanium on board, some parts, including potentially re-usable gear and hardware, are likely to survive re-entry.

It's possible there will be a 1,000 mile-footprint of debris, Bill Ailor, an aerospace engineer who specializes in atmospheric reentry, told Business Insider.

It's more likely than anything else that most debris will fall into the ocean, which covers 71% of Earth's surface. The chances of a piece hitting a person "is about 1 million times smaller than the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot," according to The Aerospace Corp., where Ailor works.

"It's not impossible, but since the beginning of the space age ... a woman who was brushed on the shoulder in Oklahoma is the only one we're aware of who's been touched by a piece of space debris," Ailor said.

Andrew "Boz" Bosworth Andrew Bosworth

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg denounced comments from one of his top executives on Thursday, following the publication of a 2016 internal memo in which the executive appeared to argue that the social network's growth objectives outweighed any harmful side-effects, including deaths, that could result from the use of the service.

The memo, written by Facebook VP Andrew "Boz" Bosworth and published by BuzzFeed on Thursday, was "one that most people at Facebook including myself disagreed with strongly," Zuckerberg said in a statement provided to Business Insider.

"We've never believed the ends justified the means," Zuckerberg said. But Zuckerberg defended the memo's author, one of his most trusted confidants, calling Bosworth a "talented leader who says many provocative things."

The comments mark the latest efforts at damage control by Zuckerberg as the 2-billion member social network he founded comes under fire for a variety of problems including its role in spreading false news and the unauthorized use of its user data by a tech firm linked to the Trump 2016 presidential campaign.

Longtime exec Andrew "Boz" Bosworth (pictured left) and Mark Zuckerberg Facebook According to the BuzzFeed report, Bosworth wrote the internal memo entitled "The Ugly," as part of the company's efforts to come to terms with some of the unintended consequences of its extreme growth that were beginning to become clear at the time.

"So we connect more people," Bosworth wrote in the memo. "That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools."

"The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good," Bosworth continued.

Bosworth, who has been at Facebook since 2006, is known for being outspoken and has found himself at the center of controversy several times during the past year.

Following the publication of the memo on Thursday, Bosworth sought to distance himself from the remarks.

"I don't agree with the post today and I didn't agree with it even when I wrote it," Bosworth said in a statement he posted on his personal Twitter account.

"The purpose of this post, like many others I have written internally, was to bring to the surface issues I felt deserved more discussion with the broader company," the statement reads.

Read the full memo on BuzzFeed.

Tesla Model S P100D. Bryan Logan/Business Insider

Tesla has issued a worldwide recall related to the power steering systems in 123,000 of its electric Model S vehicles.

Five bolts holding the power steering motor in place can corrode and either come loose or break, possibly causing a loss of power steering, the company said in an emailed statement on Thursday. Manual steering would still work in such a case.

According to Tesla, the problem is infrequent and typically occurs in cold-weather regions where salt is used to clear snow and ice on the road. No accidents or injuries have been reported, Tesla said.

The voluntary recall is specific to Model S cars that were built before April 2016, but has so far affected only 0.02% of the Model S vehicles in the US that fall under the recall's guidelines, according to the automaker.

The recall adds to a tumultuous run for Tesla of late. Here's a portion of what's happened so far:

There's also the matter of Tesla's balance sheet which has been looking morbid ahead of the car company's first-quarter earnings report, which is expected in a matter of weeks.

Tesla is also set to update shareholders on Model 3 production, which got off to a crawling start last July, and hasn't yet touched the company's original target of 5,000 units per week. Tesla slashed that target by half in January, promising to crank out 2,500 per week by the end of March.

But it looks like Tesla is climbing to just over 1,000 Model 3 units per week, according to unofficial data from Bloomberg.

In fall 2017, Tesla said it could produce 1,500 Model 3s in September alone, and 20,000 of the cars per month by December that year.

The last major voluntary Model S recall occurred in 2015, when the company summoned the entire fleet over a single Model S vehicle that experienced a seat belt malfunction.

"In order to ensure your safety, Tesla will proactively retrofit a power steering component in all Model S vehicles built before April 2016. (No other Tesla vehicles are affected.) There have been no injuries or accidents due to this component, despite accumulating more than a billion miles of driving.

To be clear, this recall does not apply to any Model X or Model 3 vehicles, only to Model S vehicles built before April 2016.

We have observed excessive corrosion in the power steering bolts, though only in very cold climates, particularly those that frequently use calcium or magnesium road salts, rather than sodium chloride (table salt). Nonetheless, Tesla plans to replace all early Model S power steering bolts in all climates worldwide to account for the possibility that the vehicle may later be used in a highly corrosive environment.

If the bolts fail, the driver is still able to steer the car, but increased force is required due to loss or reduction of power assist. This primarily makes the car harder to drive at low speeds and for parallel parking, but does not materially affect control at high speed, where only small steering wheel force is needed.

Our records show that you own a Model S affected by this voluntary recall. At this time there is no immediate action you need to take and you may continue to drive your Model S. Tesla will contact you to schedule an appointment when parts are available in your region. The retrofit will typically take around an hour."

NYC Secure will be available for iPhone and Android users this summer.Brendan McDermid/Reuters

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio introduced a new mobile phone app that will help New Yorkers protect themselves online.

NYC Secure, which iPhone and Android users will be able to download this summer, will help people avoid unsafe WiFi networks and detect malicious content and apps on their devices.

"Now that our lives are more and more online, it's our job to make sure people's lives are safe online," de Blasio said at a news conference Thursday. "Our streets are already the safest of any big city in the country — now we're bringing that same commitment to protecting New Yorkers into cyberspace."

The app will:

While the idea for the app was conceived by officials at NYC Cyber Command (NYC3), a government agency overseeing the city's cyber defenses, the app itself was built by an outside partner.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said the initiative will cost $5 million a year. Reuters/Brendan McDermid

Geoff Brown, the chief information security officer for NYC, stressed that the app will collect "zero personal data" from those who download it.

"Our intent is to have [the app] designed in a way that at the very code level, it is only doing the things that we prescribe for it to do and it is doing nothing else," Brown said during a briefing with reporters on Wednesday. "It will not be taking a list of all the apps and sending it to a third party, to us, or anyone else. It'll only be performing the functions that are necessary to guide the user away from threats."

While the initiative is being targeted to New Yorkers, the app will be available to anyone based in the US.

In addition to the app, city officials also unveiled a city-wide effort to add a new layer of protection to public WiFi hotspots so that people will be alerted whether a guest or public network is secure.

Brown said the city will deploy the initiative across all NYC government agencies' public WiFi networks by the end of the year. The city is working in partnership with Global Cyber Alliance, an international cybersecurity group that combats cybercrime.

The NYC Secure app and WiFi protection initiatives will cost the city $5 million annually, de Blasio said.

The announcement comes amid increasing cyberattacks aimed at virtually anything connected to the internet.

Just last week, a group of hackers breached government computer systems in Atlanta, a situation the city's mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, described as "a hostage situation."

The incident has raised concerns about how prepared government officials are when it comes to protecting critical infrastructures and people's personal information.

Brown said NYC Secure is an attempt to ease those concerns.

"We don't think necessarily cybersecurity solutions should only be the purview of people that either have an incredible amount of knowledge to protect themselves or an incredible amount of money to buy protection," he said.

Noah Berger/AP

A lot of people are not happy with Facebook right now. Add Scott Howe to the list.

Howe is the president and CEO of Acxiom, which collects consumer data from a wide variety of sources - data that has been employed by marketers for decades. It's also one of the companies that Facebook said it plans to stop working with for ad targeting.

Late Wednesday, Facebook announced plans to wind down a program that enabled advertisers to use data from third-party companies — ranging from Oracle to Acxiom — to target its users with specific ads.

Facebook has positioned that move as being aimed at better protecting consumer privacy in light of the ongoing fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which came to light when The New York Times and The Guardian reported that it had improperly obtained user data on as many as 50 million Facebook users.

Howe said that Facebook didn't give Acxiom a heads up regarding the decision. Beyond that slight, Howe believes that Facebook is using Acxiom and its other data partners as scapegoats to distract from its own problems.

"We are getting thrown under the bus," Howe told Business Insider. "This was a masterful political manipulation."

Howe is livid that Facebook has moved to push out data partners, even though the Cambridge Analytica controversy didn't directly have anything to do with them. "The trouble was in Facebook managing its own data," he said. "And this doesn't actually offer individuals any more protection."

Acxiom pulls data from a wide variety of sources, including public records, consumer surveys, retail records, and other vehicles to help brands tap into profiles of consumers. Howe's argument is that his company's sole focus is on protecting consumer data.

"So to blame us is hypocritical," he said. "Their statements are also so inconsistent. This is really about their walled garden. They are forcing advertisers to be reliant on Facebook reporting only. It helps them consolidate more power."

"That is awful for advertisers."

Facebook was not immediately available for comment.