| People that are criticizing this probably were also critical of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but it would be useful to compare what happened there and here. With Cambridge Analytica: - Facebook allowed users (with informed consent) to allow external developers to access their data and limited data about their friends, in order to build social-enabled apps. - CA exploited this to scrape basic profile data from a large number of users. It broke the ToS by doing so (in particular by using the data for purposes different than stated) Here the same is happening: - people are giving a third company access to their profile, which includes access to friends' data (in fact a lot more than what the app platform allowed to do) - the company is scraping all the data. At the time of CA, the criticism was that Facebook didn't do enough to enforce its ToS (or maybe that the data sharing should have not been allowed in the first place? But the terms were common knowledge and the attack potential became clear only in hindsight), here people are criticizing that Facebook is in fact enforcing its ToS. Also note that strong enforcement against scraping is one of the mandates that came from the FTC settlement. It seems inevitable that any news about Facebook/Meta is read in the worst possible light these days, even when the criticism is self-contradictory. I would expect less superficial commentary from HN. |