As much as everyone wants to believe this is because all the applicants are suddenly taking strong ethical stances, I bet it has more to do with Facebook simply not being considering cool or exciting anymore.
> Hasn’t all of this stuff been obvious forever to programmers?
Yes, but it wasn't at the "oh crap elections were manipulated, democracies toppled, dissidents tracked down, and genocides enabled" level.
The fact that Apple, the world's richest company in the world, now has a mainstream marketing campaign around privacy tells you it is now officially mainstream mainstream, not just programmer mainstream.
Yes, I think we're finally getting to the state of engineering and medicine in the 1800s, where bridges and buildings were collapsing, snake oil salesmen and physicians were indistinguishable to the layman, etc. Enough catastrophe will eventually motivate society to regulate the upstarts.
None of those things have happened though, have they? Which democracies has Facebook toppled? Which genocides did they "enable"? And as for "elections were manipulated", I'll give you that one, but the only actual evidence I've seen of Facebook manipulating elections is shutting down the pages and followers of actual conservative political parties. The whole Russia story turned out to be smoke and mirrors, and based on rather huge assumptions about the efficiency of political advertising to begin with.
Apple use privacy as an attempt to differentiate themselves from Google despite in the phone market having very little actual differences between them. It doesn't seem to have helped: Android is globally dominant.
... not really innovating? its main product is still centered in social signaling and gossip ... just like day 1. Also the social craze is not so crazy anymore (I wonder, how are the other social apps doing?)
Yeah, it's seen as the platform your parents (or worse, grandparents) use. Pretty much a step above Next Door. Why would you want to work for that over some of the other companies out there?