That's a huge over-reaction. One reason Facebook came to dominate over older social networks was that they provided much, much better user privacy controls, th

That's a huge over-reaction. One reason Facebook came to dominate over older social networks was that they provided much, much better user privacy controls, they were better at keeping fake users off their networks and they kept the site more secure. Before Facebook social networks didn't have APIs and thus didn't have permissions - everything just scraped the (always public) profile pages. Moreover many of the things they're being rapped for here aren't even betraying user trust. I believe the only time they've ever asked for passwords for third party services is to import friend lists. That's a useful and optional feature. If a mail provider doesn't have an OAuth style API, how else is it meant to work? I know everyone has decided it's cool to bash Facebook because they're big and use advertising. But when I look at the actions of the FTC here, I wonder how on earth such trivial things turned into such a huge fine. Advertising doesn't kill anyone, and targeted advertising is much preferable to the noisy punch-the-monkey type of barrel scraping ads the internet used to be filled with. If they use a phone number to better target ads to me (presumably regionally) how is this any different to using my IP address? At worst it means I see more local businesses. Yeah, if they'd had some small print somewhere, a few people would have cared. Most wouldn't and we know this because they use WhatsApp which already gives Facebook your phone number. Big deal? I just can't get worked up about these trivial "evils" that mostly exist for my own convenience, or which are irrelevant given the set of services me and all my friends use i.e. Facebook gets the same data anyway voluntarily. Why am I the only one?