[TheIronMark]

Meta literally allowed their data to be used by Cambridge Analytica in a fashion that likely swayed the 2016 US election.

EDIT: Well, this was certainly wrong. I'm leaving this up as a testament to not double-checking my assumptions.

[cm2012]

Literally every part of this sentence is wrong which shows the state of this discourse.

1) CA created their own data with quizzes on FB that people filled out and gave to CA. Even if you banned ad tracking sending people surveys and quizzes is still legal. The FB network only made the quizzes more viral.

2) The CA data was 100% useless for ad targeting and had no impact on the Trump campaigns (any professional advertisers can tell you this, it's not controversial). The big election interference impact was Russia leaking the DNC emails and other hacked stuff to string along the Hillary emails newsline.

[TheIronMark]

It's fair to say Meta didn't give the data, but they provided a platform that allowed CA to develop the app which gathered the data. On the topic of data privacy, that's a bad step by Meta.

[cm2012]

At the time the programmer zeitgeist was calling FB evil for having a walled garden and not sharing data. Them opening up the API was applauded by the tech industry and HN (look up the archives). And it still has nothing to do with FB privacy efforts today which is just light years beyond where it was in 2012.