As much as I hate Facebook, I can't really blame them for someone scraping data users decided to share publicly. When you publish data online available publicly it's normal and expected that someone can make a copy of it, either through manual data-entry or automated scraping.
The only question here is how were emails & phone numbers obtained and whether users were made aware that they would be available publicly.
The consequences of sharing data do not appear immediately. Delayed effects of things are never going to be simple to deal with. People always have been and always will be hard-wired to keep on doing things if they aren't immediately struck down.
I'm sorry but you cannot expect every user to understand the implications of putting data online. Facebook makes zero effort to protect your grandma who has no idea of the implications of putting info online. Blame facebook.
This is a terrible trend of "well you agreed to the terms and conditions so this is YOUR fault", when certain T's and C's shouldn't exist in the first place. IIRC the CEO of twitter even thinks this is bullshit.
We need to blame citizens, consumers, and users LESS than corporations, not more.
There's so much heat about that problem because it's not that simple. Implications of technology changes are not always obvious even to HN users and they are definitely not clear for majority of the people.
So yes, we need something cleaner than tons of ToS that's continually changing and we also need more educated people that know that if they put something online it's now public.
My comment is not saying anything because balanced view is like zero information. But the same is going on with politics. People tend to polarize into two camps. You can make good argument for both. By rationalizing away the other one you get a sens of self-coherence and some dopamine because yay brain we solved that issue, it's that simple.
But agreeing on small steps that seem like a good direction and understanding that some things that don't seem like a good ultimate solutions may be good local optimizations is hard. Plus it doesn't grab attention. Attention economy even in HN threads. I'm most eager to respond to views that I heavily disagree with, balanced comments get out of the way.
E.g. if I ask you if you know Bob and you say yes, I don't think you would say you violated Bob's privacy (you probably would think that if you gave me his number). So who are you friends with commonly feels like an info that is fine to share. But if I ask everybody on the planet I know all friends of Bob and he may not be fine with that. I think both technology and mindset improvements are necessary. Regulations probably too but it's hopeless how much it is lagging and understandably so given highly technical nature of most of these problems and centralized law making.
Voting with your behavior like not using fb hardly works (see Bob's problem above, but also power law and everything being connected) and we still haven't figured out how to punish bad behavior of big corporations. Losing some money is not an issue and how can you put somebody in jail if the crime was emergent and hundreds of people participated without necessarily knowing anything about it.
The only question here is how were emails & phone numbers obtained and whether users were made aware that they would be available publicly.