The Facebook / Cambridge Analytica story is completely baffling to me. Here we have a company whose business idea it is to lock up as much of the web as possib

The Facebook / Cambridge Analytica story is completely baffling to me. Here we have a company whose business idea it is to lock up as much of the web as possible on their platform. Contacts, messageboards, photos, events, calendars, chat, dating, anything goes really. They then earn money from selling data. Then the Cambridge Analytica scandal breaks where a company has used data from Facebook unethically. How was this not expected? Had it been better if this company used their data a little less unethically? Had it been better if Facebook sold PR-as-a-service directly instead of enabling an ecosystem of smaller companies offering this? (Because the latter is what is going to happen over the long run should Facebook continue to be successful. When there is no room to grow anymore the ecosystem is going to be cannibalized.) This is all inherent to business models dependent on data ownership. Upon observing the majority of the population migrating to closed platforms, the discourse among the people who care about open data must instead be framed in terms of how to shape the conditions of said business models. Codifying data ownership is one way to move forward, GDPR being the most known example. It may be blunt but it at least poses the question of who owns which data.