People are biased about Facebook for various reasons, including $privacy-issue-of-the-day; no matter what they do they get to be the villan.

That is, unless we're talking about their newest PHP optimizer or ad toolkit.

> People are biased about Facebook for various reasons, including $privacy-issue-of-the-day"

While FB as a company certainly is not altruistic, they employ quite a few privacy-minded engineers. Data leaks to the outside of their walled garden are very likely treated as company-wide problems, but as the LGBT doxes showed, there are wide implications even within their walls. [0]

As they try to capture ever larger parts of the online population, they will* keep colliding with non-Western, non-SV norms. The privacy issues may be nothing but a canary in the goldmine, because they are mostly an expression of non-SV values. For example, I have my doubts about how long images of traditional Hindu artwork would be allowed to stay up...

0: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/27/facebook-authentic-...

That's no good either, because then they are just giving it to you so they can sure you later and steal your startup due to the PATENTS file.

Don't forget to post that the next time there's a Facebook tech thread :).

I haven't naysaid yet, but I'm always wary of big companies that take actions that clearly fit into some geo-political agenda. E.g. in this case, I suspect that the aim might be to embarrass and critique nation states such as Russia, China, and whatever country the US wants to replace the leadership of (Syria right now). These countries tend to use fairly obvious and naive attacks, as opposed to the US that might be able to demand information by an NSL.

> I haven't naysaid yet, but I'm always wary of big companies that take actions that clearly fit into some geo-political agenda.

Personally, I'm beginning to feel Google and Facebook are getting more and more open about US politics going against their interests.

> These countries tend to use fairly obvious and naive attacks, as opposed to the US that might be able to demand information by an NSL.

I don't think I agree with that point. Isn't the exact opposite the case? Russia, China, et al. have to actually do the work and hack the US citizen, while the US GOV can just send the NSL and have the data delivered on silver platter by US companies, who are bound by law to comply?

One possible argument would be that having a false sense of security is worse than no security at all.