Facebook doing that is actually good, to protect consumers from data abuse after incidents like cambridge analytica. They are holding businesses who touches your personal data responsible.
There is nothing here stopping cambridge analytica from doing this again, they will provide whatever details needed. But a small pre launch personal project work that might use a facebook publishing application can't be developed or tested without first going through all the bureaucracy.
Nevermind the non profit 'free' application you might want to create on the FB platform, lets say a share chrome extension "Post to my FB", for personal use, you can't do this because you can't create an application without a company and IVA/TAX documents. It's hostile imo.
Before, you could create an app, link your ToS, privacy policy etc, verify your domain via email, and then if users wanted to use your application they would agree, this is how a lot of companies still do it. I'm actually not sure why FB do this specifically.
> to protect consumers
We are talking about Meta. They have never, and will never, protect customers. All they protect is their wealth and their political power.
Before you can sign up to build a WhatsApp bot, you need to jump through a million hoops, and after that, every automated message template must be vetted by Meta before it can be sent out, apple style.
I'm glad of this, because unlike SMS and other messaging platforms, WhatsApp is spam free and a pleasure to use.
At least here in Italy whatsapp is a spam house unless you actively update the default privacy settings in-app. There is no discernable difference between SMS and WhatsApp to spammers.