I left Facebook a few months back so I don’t have anything holding me from sharing my honest take. Also I was involved in platform development a lot. Don’t envy

I left Facebook a few months back so I don’t have anything holding me from sharing my honest take. Also I was involved in platform development a lot. Don’t envy the folks who stayed btw - now it’s gonna be much harder. In short: Facebook does care about user privacy a lot. Some of the worst pains we had in platform development at Messenger were related to convincing privacy team to let us open more info to developer. And we usually fail. There was and is a strong sense of internal paranoia around leaking any user data, even if anonimized. Whenever there’s a chance of a data leakage of any sort, everything halts and the whole team is in on it. I personally spent weeks of my life in such meetings, redesigning whole parts of the product to avoid even simplier things like anon user tracking by developers with no explicit consent etc. So when I hear people saying that Fb intentionally does something bad or doesn’t care - those people really don’t have clue. Current situation is a byproduct of two things: 1) legacy decisions (that were reverted in 2015) from when the company was younger and more open and didn’t have those protocols and 2) just the very sensitive nature of this data. This is a social network. What would you expect it to give developers from it’s API? If not your info and parts of your graph. Even those days are over now due to (imo) unjustified paranoia. Ads targeting is another example of that. The fact that you see targeted ads _does_not_ mean advertiser knows _anything_ about you individually. It’s fully anonimized for them! And no, there’s no evil intent to make the UI more confusing to get more of your data. It’s the opposite at that point, Jeez, folks, take off your tin hats. Many things to question Fb about (most notably product innovation) but here they are doing their best.