[deepburner]

This has the trademark hackernews "why would anyone use dropbox just get an FTP account, mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem" written all over it. Facebook has been involved in countless privacy scandals so that's the reason to believe this. Why you think it's easy for a random someone to dump a closed source, probably obfuscated piece of closed source embedded software and find a specific piece of code that does a specific thing is beyond me.

[saddlerustle]

As far as I know, despite the scandals facebook has never been shown to blatantly collect data without disclosing it in its privacy policy. It's unreasonable to assume it will start, in a niche product, over what most people probably find more sensitive than most of the data is collects.

It's "easy" for a competent software engineer, yes, not a random person. But I assume that's most of the people on HN.

[literallycancer]

You seem to live in a magical world where privacy policies matter and laws are enforced against corporations with unlimited legal budget.

[mannykannot]

The author of that post lives in a world where a) Facebook has actually made the specific disclosures being discussed here, and many more; b) making such disclosures has had, at most, only trivial negative consequences for Facebook; and c) not making such disclosures could provide the sort of evidence used in the legal and legislative constraints on Facebook's operations that are sometimes proposed and occasionally attempted.

[jiofih]

The average user does not read privacy policies. Remember Cambridge Analytica?