[alexmorse]

Why are we giving such a pass that it took till 2015 to even start walling off that information?

Prior to 2015 any facebook app developer could make an app that had a vague one-prompt ask for permissions that gave them nearly everything, and a ton of information on friends.

[lord_ring_11]

Probably because some employee could not justify “impact” on this. If anything it will lower some key metric that was getting measured, because not giving all friend info will lower app adoption growth numbers. Most levels at facebook is filled with metric obsessed robots (because of how incentives are aligned).

[jrowen]

Probably because it was done in plain sight and anybody could have worked through the implications then but nobody cared?

"I didn't realize that one day the media would convince me that this was a really bad thing" is not Facebook's fault.

Most people actually don't care if apps get their "data" and their friend list. But the media worked up a frenzy by vaguely connecting it to the Trump campaign (reminder that nobody blinked when Facebook openly gave everything to the Obama campaign), and now everyone has "realized" that Facebook is to blame for their problems.