[ftyhbhyjnjk]

What hypocrite these companies(fb, google, linkedin, twitter, etc.) are.... Almost entirety of the content on their sites is user generated and shared with public scope. Then why the hell these companies think it's wrong to scrape that very "public" data.

The reason is simple: they just want to maintain their monopoly on the data. That's it. These companies themselves run their advertising companies based on the very same data and train their machine learning models, and also, actually sell it(cambridge analytics, ... possibly 1000's more through 3rd party partnerships to take the blame if things go wrong).

US companies are truly monstrous... by size, and their ability to care for others.

[Nextgrid]

Not disagreeing with your other points but Facebook didn't sell anything to Cambridge Analytica and in fact wasn't even really complicit. All they did was provide them with a way to request access to people's accounts as a standard OAuth2 flow. Idiots agreed to the access requests and as a result gave not only their own information but the information entrusted to them by friends.

The proper response to CA would've been to send everyone affected a notification saying "Your friend <name> shared your data with a third-party that is now known to be malicious. <Unfriend> <Learn More>".

The real issue with CA is that people are dumb enough to trust anything they see on the internet without a second thought. Why does a stupid "personality test" require access to my Facebook account? It doesn't and they should've declined the access prompt right there and flagged the post as malicious.

[bornfreddy]

To be fair, granting access to one's Facebook account is a pretty good indicator of one's personality. :)