[bilbo0s]

Well given all this and the consent decree, I'm kind of seeing why FB made this decision. If it's legal, let the FTC say so explicitly.

It's probably very bad strategy to allow the privacy leak, and then hope that the FTC agrees with your decision later. No one will be sanctioned for adhering too strictly to consent decrees, but you could be sanctioned for being too loose. So the choice is obvious in that light.

[throwwebmaster]

It will be interesting to see how the FTC will rectify its ongoing fight to hold FB more accountable for protecting its users’ private data with the FTC’s ostensibly contradictory position to allow mass scraping of private user data at scale in this case. Cambridge Analytica was doing roughly the exact same thing, which was precisely what motivated the FTC's involvement in the first place.