Surely, you see a difference between a data company collecting data from users who willingly hand it to them, and a government that forces those companies to hand over private data against their will?
To be clear about address books: they are "yours", but they hold data that you may not have permission to give away.
Also, Facebook didn't ask me when my friends gave my phone number and address to them.
Zuckerberg has repeatedly shown a lot of moral flexibility on those issues - so the irony is definitely there.
Of course to some extent I would also argue this is where things get grey - in a practical sense, private individuals do not, and have never, existed in civil society. Civil society necessitates making parts of your life public.
Every website that you ever visited with a "like" button, even porn sites. They compiled all of that information about "you" via cookies they put on your computer.
Well that would be on you not Facebook.
They also cannot make a reasonable assumption that the agent giving away the data _has_ permission and is lying to them.
Yahoo, hotmail etc, they all used to scoop up contacts when users (willingly, just like they do with facebook) agreed to give them access in exchange for services rendered.
This is totally different from the government (a third party to either transaction) forcing Facebook to give them data (or stealing face book's data).
Do they have that agreement with ISPs? Phones companies? Supermarkets with facial recognition software to track shopping habits?
Since a lot of this data tuff is about aggregation, entities sharing data can have a lot of consequences. If you have Facebook, Whatsapp & email data for a significant number of people, then you have a lot of data about people that aren't signed up to any of those.
I think trying to categorize data privacy issues into "users agreed to." is pedantic in a way that gets away from the reality of what is going on. The hacking vs just recording may have legal importance, but I don't think
I've said this before, the digitization & aggregations of so much data is a bigger world changing issue. The Snowden/wikileaks affairs are a strange double example. The US agencies have their data stolen and spread around because it's "data." This data is largely information about how they steal data. You can't keep your secrets from them and they have trouble keeping their secrets data from you.
"Voluntary" or "consensual" mean different things in different contexts.
Also, facebook collects information about people who have never had a facebook account and who don't want one.
[1] the GCHQ cache was accessed less than a thousand times, for example. Google trawls my data many times a day.
On a bigger note - does it bother anyone that almost every privacy discussion has come to "who is lesser evil"? Kinda like politics ("we can't find a good candidate, so we are voting for the least bad candidate")