its such a coincidence that these accidents keep happening in ways that enable further data gathering...surely there isn't a larger problem with Facebook's attitude towards their users' private data or anything
"New Facebook Feature Allows User To Cancel Account. ... The company later confirmed that account closures would not stop Facebook from continuing to acquire, permanently store, and sell all information about its current and former users until the day they die." https://www.theonion.com/new-facebook-feature-allows-user-to...
That bug would be a critical failure and be caught, the reverse would be a non-critical bug that the PM decides to to put in the backlog because reasons. If in a year we haven't gotten around the fixing it, then it's time to clean out that backlog!
When every public-facing thing you build is centered on hoovering up data, you're going to have two broad classes of errors. Hoovering up too little data, which doesn't hit the news, and hoovering up too much, which does.
That said, when your "errors" directly line your pockets, you're not entitled to the benefit of the doubt.
It’s pretty hard for me to imagine that there’s some other function that just happens to coincide with accessing different email servers and collect past emails to collect the email addresses.
It was deliberate because of the work involved. The only investigators that think it’s accidental probably believe the internet is a small black box guarded by the “Internet wizards”.
I'm not excusing FB, but it still makes sense. Their whole business model is data collection on their users, graphing connections between these users, and brokering deals with advertisers about users on the platform. When something goes awry, you can bet that it will somehow affect one of those things.