I hadn't considered it until that parent post. Compared to what I've seen out of Wall Street banks during the great recession, Equifax, shady lenders, mortgage scumbags, politicians, big tobacco, big oil, big sugar, GE & PCBs, CIA/Bush & torture, various Iraq war scandals, NSA spying scandal, Yahoo, Target, and about 407 other data, consumer, privacy breaches or abuses I've seen the last 20-30 years - Facebook gets high marks in this round for being very public about responding and tackling it head-on, but only after prior delay & evade maneuvers in the past. Most likely they recognized they were staring down a serious Congressional legislative/regulatory problem that could severely damage their business, and had no choice.
- They are highly reactive, pushing a lot of new changes publicly (I know that the changes don't actually change anything, but from a PR perspective they do)
- They are super apologetic and stand for their mistakes
Now, it's, of course, impossible to say today if they are going to get better re privacy, but they definitely make the public impressions that they will. And that's a good response to the crises they're having.
PS: This is a neutral observation of their actions
Mark said he didn't have details about how data is collected outside of Facebook (and it is very likely that he expected to say something false or irrelevant -- and he did: data collection for security purposes is not personal) but that he will come back to it, and he delivers, under a week.