Yes, it is boring, yes it is repetitive. And it will continue to be that way until facebook gains a shred of decency. But I guess that we should just forgive and ignore because there are too may of them?

Maybe you are not the target of these stories, the public at large do feel that they are surprising and shocking.

> the public at large do feel that they are surprising and shocking.

Not OP, but I don't think the point is that its a non-story to the public at large, I think the point is that its a non-story to anyone reading HN, which is decidedly not the public at large.

I get where they're coming from. If I go to reddit or local news and see a bunch of Facebook non-stories I would tend to discount that as the public finally waking up to this. When I come here and see a Facebook article I immediately assume it is important and I need to pay attention because the audience here is so different than reddit/local news. If I can't trust HN to filter for only truly important stories then I'll start to treat it like Reddit and look for a better source for truly important news, which would be a shame.

The HN frontpage is a pretty poor proxy for "importance." It's simply whatever the users of HN find interesting. AFAIK, there is no "only upvote truly important" stories rule.

Facebook PR strategy is now coming straight out of the Trump’s PR book.

I'm guessing for being a pro-Facebook shill and/or an anti-Facebook zealot.

People share data with Facebook for a particular, immediate benefit to themselves. I share my location so my friends can see where I am, I post my photos so my friends can see what I'm doing and who I'm with, I share my contacts so I can find my friends, etc. In and of itself, this should be fine and safe to do. The problem comes when Facebook takes the data that was given to them for one purpose, in one context, and they use it for another purpose now or in the future.

I can't make informed consent when it comes to data, because the real value of data only comes from when it's aggregated with other data -- either my own over time, or other peoples'. I can't know what incremental effect this datum has when it's combined with everything else Facebook knows about me, and all their other users, and run through their current or future machine learning algorithm. So, it's impossible to know whether it's in my interest to disclose any particular bit of information to them.

Details that are innocuous to human eyes can be very salient to algorithms. I might disclose a set of data points and never make any connection between them. I might mention I feel tired on one day, and write with a negative tone on a few other days, and wake up (i.e, open Facebook for the first time in the morning) later than usual. Without knowing this, that's enough information for Facebook to make a confident inference that I'm depressed, an inference that amounts to discovering private information I never intended to reveal. Of course, they don't disclose that they know that about me, but they do use it against me. They may target ads for anti-depressant drugs, or they may invisibly bias my news feed to have more negative content.

That's even assuming I'm aware that I'm disclosing information at all. If I log into Facebook to see what my friends are up to, then close the tab and start browsing the web, Facebook knows where I go on the web any time I visit a page with Facebook comments even if I don't post any comments. The content of the page, combined with other data they know about me and the other visitors to the site, can be combined to make inferences about me, my interests and hobbies, my sex or sexual orientation, race, socioeconomic class, medical conditions, vices, and so on.

We can't expect every person to become experts on data analysis so they can fully understand the implications of disclosing their data.