Facebook wants to "normalize" the idea that large scale scraping of user data from social networks like its own is a common occurrence Get people used to the t

Facebook wants to "normalize" the idea that large scale scraping of user data from social networks like its own is a common occurrence Get people used to the truth? Shock, horror! I mean, certainly Facebook rose to it's position through a sort of opposite claim, that a user could be "public" (visible to a wide circle of friends-of-friends-of-etc) but not public (visible to Russian hackers, Brazilian botmasters or whoever). This claim is kind of a fairy tale, something that no only isn't true but couldn't be true. "This information is public to anyone who creates an account but not public en masse to the world". Still, the claim made an average FB user feel safer (and lot of people "got on the Internet" in a big way through FB circa ~2010). And it's got a lot of traction now. But since the situation is fundamentally porous, now that FB is large, it seems it's in their legal interest to drop the bullshit and just say "if it's public, it's public, what the hell else do you expect". And yeah, the exploitation of public data arguably lead to all sorts of bad effects and it would have been and would be nice to head this off in some fashion. But imagining you can this off by maintain a "quote-public versus totally-public" distinction isn't one of those ways.