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Being opt-in and getting compensated are the two things I've seen people want from usage of their data. No one should have an issue with this since it does both.

> Suppose tech companies were no longer legally allowed to use the network effect (i.e. they had to provide open-access to their public data via API).

Facebook and Twitter have public APIs.

You have to give Facebook a copy of your ID, your SSN and wait for them to snail-mail you a code before you can get as far as Vice did. There's nothing friction-less about it.

> No one is seriously asking Apple to police hate speech in iMessage or Facetime, for instance

Many people are demanding that Facebook do exactly this.

Most founders of major acquisitions leave after a year or two. The founders of Instagram and WhatsApp were at Facebook for more than 5+ years. That's very rare.

This Twitter thread by Alex Stamos (former Facebook CSO) is a good rebut to this: https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1046783533220421632. Bottom line: you can do incident response quickly or correctly, but not both.

There's going to be a Sputnik moment in the next decade or two where The West wakes up to how far it's fallen behind in this area.

That already exists. If you click the menu icon next to an ad on Facebook you can select "Why am I seeing this?". You can also see all the advertisers who have targeted you on https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/.

Your employment history isn't private information. It's sold by data brokers to companies for recruiting.

Favebook’s policy for not giving information to family members came out of situations where the decreased was not on good terms with their family. When to give out information and to whom are not obvious or easy decisions when you have a billion users.

No company cares about you, but Facebook probably cares more than other big tech companies (Google, Microsoft, etc.) if only because your feelings drive your usage of its services.

Facebook doesn't sell data, and unless you think it's a bad thing for them to have an API then they don't distribute data either.

"These weren’t very hard to find. It was as easy as a simple Google search."

The difficulty is that in many cases it's the local authorities who are the ones spreading the inflammatory content and their requests for moderation are actually requests for censorship.

GDPR doesn't go into effect until May 25. The article states that this is a test that will become opt-in at that time.

> People didn't realize Facebook was selling their secrets.

Facebook doesn't sell data, it sells ads.

The data accessed here was from a smaller unrelated research study. The only thing it has in common with the larger CA leak is that it was done by the same researcher.

The headline is misleading. The article isn't about Cambridge Analytica:

"Because of an editing error, an earlier version of a headline with this article misidentified the entity that improperly harvested the personal information of up to 87 million Facebook users. The information was collected though a quiz app developed by the researcher Aleskandr Kogan, not by the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica."

"It is not clear whether the direct messages were among the data eventually provided to Cambridge Analytica. In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Kogan told The Times that the private messages were harvested from a limited number of people, likely “a couple thousand,” as part of a separate academic research project and never provided to Cambridge Analytica."

Facebook doesn't sell data, it sells ads. It's in Facebook's interest to prevent advertisers and developers from collecting and misusing data so they buy more ads.

"In response to critics Facebook vows to do more to monitor its users' messages" - future TechCrunch headline. People might want to think about the unintended consequences of their criticism a bit more.

What did leaking this memo actually accomplish? If you are someone who wants tech companies to be accountable for their impact on society you should welcome these internal conversations. All that the leak will do is make them less likely.

Facebook already has that base covered with Oculus.

If you read higher up in that wiki it lists all of the money the initiative has given away so far. I'm not sure why people think that the LLC doesn't give away money.

Zuckerberg changed his mind on this in an interview in 2014:

"I don't know if the balance has swung too far, but I definitely think we're at the point where we don't need to keep on only doing real identity things," he says. "If you're always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden."

https://www.csoonline.com/article/2226288/microsoft-subnet/a...

Facebook has no serious competition at the moment other than Snapchat. Young people are still using Instagram and Messenger. Ironically, the calls for regulation might actually end up helping Facebook in the end as they will make the barriers to entry higher.

Both were being run off of VC money when Facebook acquired them. They would be in Snapchat's shoes right now if they were still independent.

What would breaking up Facebook look like? Most features of Facebook couldn't operate as standalone businesses without creating their own massive ad networks.

Facebook has restricted apps to only receiving app-scoped IDs since 2014.

This gets to the debate around if you can consent when giving up information about your friends. For example, is it OK for someone to give a company access to their phone's address book when the people in it haven't consented themselves?

Should investors be able to sue a company anytime its stock goes down?