[cantthinkofone]

My assumption, my hope really, is that FB gave away private messages in some sanitized and anonymized manner, because Spotify and Netflix was happy to pay for any insider marketing data they could receive about what relevant chat histories have to say about music or movies.

NYT seems to be on the attack against FB out of some ideological motivation but the details they are presenting leaves out contextual information about how the data was processed before it was handed off.

There's no question FB has been nothing but elusive and ink-spraying about this whole set of ordeals. It's one level of uncomfortable if FB is simply handing away sanitized data, it's another thing if you can just pay them and they will give you all the private posts of any given user without any sort of identity protection.

The fact of the matter is FB's terms basically allow them absolute possession of whatever data you give them. So there is so much grey area and legal ambiguity that it has been allowed to work with, especially in the US which matters most for a US company.

Europe has come around to the concept of citizen's rights to their own data. In some countries you can't even use websites unless they inform you they store cookies. At the end of the day, it's your responsibility who you give your data to.

[bogomipz]

>"NYT seems to be on the attack against FB out of some ideological motivation"

What ideology is that? The ideology of truth? The ideology of facts? The ideology of accountability and transparency? The ideology that one of the most power corporations in the world willfully failed to comply with a federal consent decree? Or that they lied to congress? You mean those ideologies? Did you miss the entire news story about how FB was used to influence the 2016 election?

And as such it is very much a public interest story. And you want to suggest that reporting on such a public interest story by a newspaper of record is "an attack"?