Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
LOL at the defense of Facebook in this thread.

If they weren't a politically left-leaning corporation, the same people making excuses for them would be calling for all kinds of penalties and blaming them huge for this situation.

But it's so much easier to solely rest blame upon the Bannon Bogeyman, right?

Facebook is not naive. They were not caught with their pants down. They were not unwitting dupes. They were not responsible actors whose innocent tool was used for evil.

They've been engaging in obnoxious and intentional privacy violations for more than a decade, all in the name of profit.

They have gotten away with this because they have done a good job at keeping their userbase ignorant as to what's been going on, especially through providing "privacy controls" which don't do nearly as much as most users think they do.

Despite having an otherwise intuitive and straightforward interface, their privacy settings are complicated, difficult to navigate, and misleading. Do you think that was an accident? Do you think a decade of experience of being the world's largest social media site wasn't enough time for them to discover and deal with these issues?

People have been bitching at Facebook for many years about their dismissive and intrusive practices, and they've intentionally ignored these valid complaints.

Facebook was even aware that millions of users' info was in the process of being harvested here, but they knowingly allowed it when the excuse was simply "LOL this is for educational purposes".

Amazing.

The blame-the-victims mentality here is disturbing. These victims weren't a few idiots who overshared way too much on social media. We are talking about many millions of people whose valuable information was harvested without their knowledge, simply via the existing Facebook privacy holes which people have complained about for the past decade. Nothing was hacked, and nothing proprietary was stolen. Reread that last sentence. This entire privacy violation was committed using Facebook's existing and intended interface, and nothing has yet been changed.

But oh yeah, let's just blame Bannon for this, and let's just cast Trump supporters as clueless dupes. Much easier narrative for many to swallow.
Solid projecting. Pretty much you're the only one that has said that FB's excuse was that it was for educational purposes. Academic purposes, more precisely research. It's a thing they do in science. Perfectly legal on FB's side. You can get anthrax from CDC for research with the right credentials. You can't get anthrax for educational purposes.

There's really no need to pick a favorite here and then excuse everyone else. It's perfectly fine that CA broke the law, FB is a scummy greedy corporation and people are idiots. Stupidity for the most parts isn't a crime. Being scummy and greedy also not a crime.