How was Facebook an 'horrible actor' in the CA scandal exactly? Facebook had relatively permission APIs. The entire world knew it. Journalists, developers, Big

How was Facebook an 'horrible actor' in the CA scandal exactly? Facebook had relatively permission APIs. The entire world knew it. Journalists, developers, Big Cos. Nobody was screaming that there was a problem. Though there were a few issues around privacy, there wasn't really any public dialog specifically around the nature of those APIs. CA found a sneaky way to take advantage of somewhat open APIs. As the world started to become somewhat more concerned, and FB saw some room for potential abuse - FB rightly tightened up the APIs a little. This was long before the CA scandal blew up. Then it became public that CA was doing some sneaky things with the data. It's actually highly debatable if they did anything wrong within the context of the information available - or at least outside of industry norms -> what CA was doing with data from FB is what everyone is and was doing with data from similar sources. FB called on CA to erase the data, and checked that they did. It turns out, CA lied and did not. FB did the right thing every step of the way in the CA scandal. APIs of every kind err a little bit one way or the other over time and as issues surfaced, FB moved in the right direction without coaxing. The media absolutely misrepresented the entire issue. They didn't really make it clear what happened, nor did they clarify what exactly FB did wrong, but most importantly, they misled the public with respect to a separate, secondary issue which was 'special API access'. The 'scandal' is that there are tons of companies like CA using private data for all sorts of reasons, it's mostly not FB. There are definitely privacy issues around FB, and I'm not fan of them, but those are a separate issue.