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I sort of agree. However note that when you pull data about friends, you don't get information about friends who have a higher privacy setting. Also, you can't get personal information about these friends through the api, however you could just web scrape it for many.

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“Higher privacy setting” is kind of meaningless when Facebook seemingly goes out of its way to make the settings page hard to use. You pretty much need a PhD at this point to understand what all the toggles do, and even then it’s not enough because they automatically opt you in to any new feature. I remember at some point in the beginning when they kept resetting all my privacy settings because they refactored their features but didn’t preserve my old privacy setting... I just gave up at that point and stopped bothering.

When CA was operating, the API allowed access to data that you allowed your friends to see. Which is a pretty common data setting as most of us are on FB to share info with our friends: https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/faceb...

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