Not related to private data but I've seen a bank shadow fund a project to get the mortgage review packages of a competitor to run through their models and test them out, also giving this one bank all the data on the mortgage packages and the scores. A really big bank did this to two others BIG lenders (one lender directly related to the federal government).
We were instructed to turn a blind eye and the business model was exfiltrating info to a different lending institution while the auspice is we were only building a product as a service.
My personal opinion is ALL your data is being sold. Every single bit that can be collected will be sold with no protections, regulations.
> My personal opinion is ALL your data is being sold. Every single bit that can be collected will be sold with no protections, regulations.
I don't understand -- especially in this crowd -- how this is even a question, at this point, nor why anything related to this fact even warrants discussion any more, given the knowable ubiquity of the practice. I guess the only thing left is figuring out a novel way to capitalize on it, like the Gold Rush.
You don't need his crazy stories, really. All you need to do is accept that Facebook isn't behaving exceptionally poorly, this is industry standard. Lo and behold - the entire sector is suddenly a cesspool of disrespect and money grabbing at the cost of your data, your privacy, anything they will be able to get away with. And they can get away with a lot, because you are not allowed to talk when you work anywhere. On pain of basically having your life ruined.
The behaviour is poor, yes. But if you view it among it's peers it's not at all poor, it's normal. That that normal is actually "exceptionally poor" might be true, but that's not really the point I was trying to make. On that I think we agree.
If you're implying that "most in the know" think FB is much worse than competitors or even other IT companies, we do indeed disagree. Sadly that is not something we can argue here, because if you are in the know you cannot share examples :)