[truesy]

I worked at a company that had viral apps during the same timeframe mentioned in Zuckerberg's response. Our company pulled data of friends of friends. The amount of data people gave us was staggering.

A few years later the data was much more restricted, much harder to get, and much clearer to the user what was going on.

It's easy to point to Fb and say they are evil, but it really seems to me like it's the 3rd parties that are causing most of the issues, and Fb has been pretty decent at locking it down in the last number of years. Keeping in mind that they were the first who had social data in such large amounts where there was no prior example.

[philipodonnell]

You're letting them off too easy. The FTC consent decree was in 2011 and this happened in 2013. They settled with the FTC and paid no fines by agreeing not to give users data away without express consent and then let the api continue doing exactly that until 2014.

Maybe in 2010 your comment would apply, but when this happened they knew very well they weren't supposed to be doing this.