Updated at 7:50 p.m. ET

The Federal Trade Commission confirmed Monday that it is investigating the possible misuse of the personal information of as many as 50 million Facebook users. The probe comes after the social network admitted it suspended a firm that worked on behalf of the Trump campaign to use personal information gathered on Facebook to target potential Trump supporters.

Privacy activists and some members of Congress have called for the agency to fully investigate whether the handling of Facebook user data violated a 2011 consent decree with the FTC. The consent decree was the result of a two-year-long investigation by the agency into Facebook’s privacy practices.

The current investigation stems from the purchase of personal data by Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm, from a researcher who gathered it by using a Facebook app. The app asked users to take a personality test and then gathered data not only about them but about their friends.

“This latest scandal will be a test case of whether [the FTC] is willing to put the public before the data gathering industry,” says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy rights group. Chester and other advocates charge that the FTC hasn’t been keeping a close enough eye on consumer privacy.

But Chris Hoofnagle, who directs the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology at University of California Berkeley, says it isn’t clear that Facebook violated the consent decree. According to Hoofnagle, the decree says that Facebook is not liable when users consent to giving their friends’ information to Facebook.

However, Hoofnagle thinks what is likely is that once the FTC starts investigating the social network it will find that it has engaged in other illegal practices. Hoofnagle says Facebook attracts developers by making it easy to get personal information. He believes that makes it very tempting for Facebook to overlook breaches of privacy so that they can keep attracting developers.

In a statement, the FTC says it takes very seriously recent press reports raising substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook. Facebook says it will cooperate with the FTC and says it would “appreciate the opportunity to answer questions the FTC may have.”

Facebook was also hit with another lawsuit. Cook County, Ill., is suing the company and Cambridge Analytica. Cook County’s State Attorney Kimberly M. Fox says both companies violated Illinois’ fraud law.

In a statement Fox said, “Cambridge Analytica deliberately mislead Facebook users by mining — without user’s knowledge — information about every Facebook ‘friend’ of people who took an online ‘personality quiz.'”

The suit also alleges that Facebook engaged in deceptive practices because it represented to the public that strict limitations and protocols on data gathering were in place. Yet, the suit says, Facebook knowingly allowed app developers, including Cambridge Analytica, to accumulate and mine data in excess of these policies.

The Cook County lawsuit is one of several that have been filed since The New York Times and The Observer of London reported that Cambridge Analytica had gained access to private information belonging to tens of millions of Facebook users. Among the lawsuits is one being brought by a Facebook user as a class action case for violation of user privacy. Another case is being brought by a shareholder because of the drop in stock price after the data harvesting was revealed.

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Sunita Williams wasn’t the kind of kid who wanted to be an astronaut when she grew up. She wanted to be a veterinarian. But she managed to achieve the former kid’s dream job, anyway.

Williams, 52, has completed two missions to the International Space Station, spending over 11 months orbiting the Earth in total. She holds the record total cumulative spacewalk time by a female astronaut, having spent 50 hours and 40 minutes outside the International Space Station. She’s continued her career in space on Earth as a member of NASA’s Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap), a group of veteran astronauts that works with privately-held companies like Space X and Boeing to develop spacecrafts.

Part of her job is to verify that the companies’ spacecraft can launch, maneuver in orbit and dock to stationary spacecraft like the ISS. NASA announced the CCtCap in 2015 as part of “the Obama Administration’s plan to partner with U.S. industry to transport astronauts to space, create good-paying American jobs and end the nation’s sole reliance on Russia for space travel.”

“This is really different from my old job, you know,” Williams said. When she became an astronaut, the shuttle was already laid out. “It was all documented and out there, and [I] went through classes to understand all the systems,” she said. “The plan was there, and you had to get this, this and this done before you could go fly out in space.”

Her path to the stars began with the Navy. Williams graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a bachelor’s in physical science in 1987. After graduation, she was designated a Basic Diving Officer at the Naval Coastal System Command. She was designated a Naval Aviator in 1989, and went on to log more than 3,000 flight hours in more than 30 different aircraft.

Williams received a master’s degree in engineering management from the Florida Institute of Technology in 1995. In 1997, she, along with more than 100 other people, applied for a position as an astronaut. After more than a year of interviewing, she was selected by NASA in June 1998. Williams spent five months training for her first mission, and received intensive instruction in shuttle and ISS systems, and water and wilderness survival techniques. Williams also spent nine days underwater in NASA’s undersea Aquarius laboratory.

Williams took her first ride into space on Dec. 9, 2006 aboard the STS-116. “We were hootin’ and hollering,” Williams said of her first takeoff. “It is like the best roller coaster ride you’ve ever been on.”

“You take your gloves off, your gloves start to float,” she recalled. “It’s a whole different mindset. It’s pretty spectacular.”

Williams served as Expedition 14/15’s flight engineer, and returned to Earth on June 22, 2007. On July 14, 2012, Williams returned to the ISS as part of Expedition 32/33 to conduct general research abroad the orbiting laboratory. She returned to Earth on November 18, 2012.

For Williams, every day at the International Space Station was different. “One day you might be cleaning the toilet, next day you might be doing some potentially Nobel Prize-winning science,” she said.

Williams says that during her two long stays aboard the ISS, she and her fellow crew members worked to keep a normal earthbound schedule and a sense of regularity to their days. “We get up at 6 o’ clock or so, and there’s daily planning conferences with control centers all over the world,” she said.

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Sunita Williams performs maintenance during a spacewalk outside the International Space Station in 2012. The astronaut has spent more than 50 hours “spacewalking”.

NASA Photo

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NASA Photo

On Fridays, the astronauts would indulge in films from both Russia and the United States. Williams recalled that Groundhog Day was a favorite, given how repetitive the days aboard the ISS could feel. By the time she returned permanently to Earth in 2012, she had spent 322 total days in space — at the time, her combined stints were the longest on record for women astronauts.

Since the discontinuation of NASA’s Space Shuttle program in 2011, U.S. astronauts have had to rely on Russian shuttles to get into orbit — which Williams and her internationally sourced crew did during her 2012 mission. Compared to its heyday, publicly funded space travel in the U.S. was no longer a hugely viable option for those wishing to explore space — but as it turned out, private space travel was.

Privately funded companies such as Space X and Boeing have made it their business over the past two decades to take over some parts of space travel from NASA. That business is booming — just last month, Space X successfully launched the most powerful rocket in decades. The launch was one small step toward Space X founder Elon Musk’s ultimate vision: a colony of a million people living on Mars.

In order to achieve those otherworldly ambitions, Space X and other private companies need the right kind of people working for them — people like Williams.

The space machinery of private companies that Williams now supports are still works-in-progress. “They don’t really have training systems established for them yet,” she said. “We’re sort of creating that right now with the folks at the companies.” That means deciding what things are important for astronauts to know — “classic things like getting in your seat, reach[ing] all the controls,” she said. “We’re establishing all that with the companies right now.” Her contributions have helped to build the Boeing CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX Dragon.

Williams’ work has also provided transportation for NASA astronauts to her old base, the ISS. And more broadly, Williams says that private space companies just want to keep learning and exploring. Though she works with familiar components and protocols, she says her new job feels like a new frontier. Williams hopes to revisit the ISS in the future on the very spacecraft she’s helping to develop.

“We want to keep finding the next thing,” she said. “And this type of exploration with a common goal, a common good of looking at something farther and bigger than ourselves. It totally opens the door for collaboration and cooperation for people from all over the world.”

NPR’s Noor Wazwaz helped to produce this story for broadcast.

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Autumn Weese thinks she was fired last month, but she isn’t entirely sure. Weese told her boss at an Arkansas coffee shop she needed to cut back her hours as she pursued her master’s degree.

“The last email I got from her said that she … ‘totally understood the situation,’ ” Weese says. But then colleagues started telling her how sorry they were to hear she was leaving in two weeks. That was when Weese started suspecting she had been fired.

“Everybody knew that I was done with the company, before I did, which was upsetting,” she says. “And also, they were all told that I quit by choice, not that I was fired, and so that was kind of awkward as well.”

Weese emailed the owners and her boss, but no one responded. So for weeks, she continued checking through a scheduling app on her phone to see whether she was put back on a shift, thinking at first that it might just be a mistake, instead of a big insult.

“I just want someone to … look me in the eye and tell me that I’m done,” Weese says.

Similar incidents have been playing out in the highest offices of government. Earlier this month, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly found out he had been fired via Twitter. Last summer, White House chief of staff Reince Priebus was canned in similar fashion. And former FBI Director James Comey found out he had lost his job from seeing it on TV.

That is not to say this is, or should be, common practice, says Dan Ryan, principal of Ryan Search and Consulting near Nashville, Tenn. He says there is no excuse for disrespecting people as you dismiss them.

“Especially now, if you’re leading an organization, you don’t need any negatives out there about how you treat people,” he says. Word gets out, and recruitment will be even harder than it is already. “I mean, it’s tough enough to find skilled people now,” Ryan says.

He says a botched firing can destroy morale for existing staff, as well as turn off prospective hires.

Employers who don’t follow the proper process could also open themselves up to claims of discrimination or wrongful termination.

“There’s every reason in the world not to fire someone on Twitter,” says Tracie Sponenberg, senior vice president of human resources at The Granite Group and an expert with the Society for Human Resource Management. At the same time, she acknowledges that rumors travel quickly over text or chat systems like Slack. In her job, she says, sometimes workers find out they’re getting fired before she gets to talk to them.

“In this day and age, nothing’s private: Something’s on Facebook, or something’s on Twitter, or something Snapchatted the moment it happened,” she says. “So, oftentimes, everyone knows before you get a chance to even talk about it.”

Some blame social media for a decline in workplace civility, but Troy Speers, and engineer in the San Jose, Calif., area, says publicly humiliating terminations are nothing new. Decades ago, he worked at a firm that conducted layoffs over the company’s public speaker system.

A couple dozen names would be read over the speakers, and those workers were told to report to human resources. After several minutes, Speers says, the roll call would restart, like a firing squad. This continued for days.

“You felt really bad for the people who got whacked,” Speers says. “Then after a while, we were like, ‘I know I’m going to be next, so call my name so we can get it over with.’ “

All work ceased, as people grimly said their goodbyes.

“All bridges are burned,” he says. “It was that wounding to your mentality.”

Bridget Garcia was encouraged to go on vacation and told she would come back to a higher-paying position. But she returned to find that everyone left her behind on an assignment and that she had no job.

Christie Meier-Livingston /Courtesy of Bridget Garcia

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Christie Meier-Livingston /Courtesy of Bridget Garcia

Blasting pink slips over the loudspeaker is one thing. But Bridget Garcia says having a boss avoid the conversation is just as awful.

Garcia, who lives in Pasadena, Calif., was working on a kids’ TV show over a decade ago when she was told that she would get a promotion and that she should take a few weeks off while the show went on hiatus.

“I said, ‘Oh, that’s great, I’ll go visit my sister in Bermuda,’ ” she says. Garcia says her boss responded: “That should be so fun for you and then you’ll come back and you’ll be making more money, so it’s not a problem.”

But when Garcia returned, she found the entire office had already left for a shoot — without her. She called her boss, who told her, “Oh, yeah, there’s no job for you. How was your vacation?”

“It felt like total betrayal because I felt I had been tricked into training my replacement, spending money that I would no longer have,” Garcia says, and she felt tricked into believing that the people she worked with respected her.

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Jacqueline Haney’s boss left a voice message firing her — on someone else’s phone.

Mark Leibold/Courtesy of Jacqueline Haney

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Mark Leibold/Courtesy of Jacqueline Haney

And then there is the case of Jacqueline Haney of Easthampton, Mass. A couple of months ago, she reported to work early, when her boss demanded to know what she was doing there. Haney says she started explaining she was fixing database errors, when her boss said, “No, why are you here, didn’t you get my phone message?”

Turns out the boss had left a voicemail firing Haney over the weekend, but on the wrong phone. “This woman who fired me for making mistakes had apparently made a mistake in firing me,” Haney says.

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