I think Facebook knows how people perceive their product, and I think they also know the difference between expressed preference and revealed preference.
OTOH, Hacker News is not "the public." It seems to me like most regular users complaints about Facebook are related to too many sponsored posts, junk notifications from games, and missing updates they consider important but Facebook does not.
I think HNers seem to be completely unaware that most Facebook users really don't care about user privacy that much.
These "oh crap I have to move my stuff, Facebook owns it" reactions baffle me. I can understand a desire for privacy, but using an online service by definition means you're at risk.
Hosting your own services on your own computers and communicating with open distributed protocols would be the most private way to go, though the problem with that is there's basically no money in building a social media system that works that way, so many attempts (Atompub/Atom, XMPP) have mostly remained niches.
They are aware that people complain (they complain to Facebook after-all) but they assume those are people that are exaggerating and won’t actually change their behaviour. By and large, that is also true. They have no metric to measure pent-up resentment, nor can their imagine a possible sanction, other than migration to a new service.
Because that threat is likely, they try to purchase those when they appear.
My take remains that public intervention should be considered. There is no legal framework for that for the moment — therefore Facebook lawyers don’t see the issue; if there were, their lobbyists would be all over it.
I personally don't feel they disrespect privacy and furthermore I know there are others who feel similarly. It's usually those who are outraged (not always the minority) that are the loudest.
For the record, I think they take privacy seriously, however I think allowing an entity to build up that much information on you & your family is inherently risky behavior.
History has shown that laws may target unpopular groups who have done nothing wrong, and well meaning governments can force well meaning companies to divulge information relevant to unjust laws.
It definitely seems a little naive to hand over the keys to your life's data without accepting that you're taking on a fairly large amount of risk with regards to privacy. Even if the party to which you're handing it over doesn't intentionally behave maliciously, you still have to trust that they share your exact opinion on what reasonable use of the data is.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/facebook-we-will-make-our-p...