I don't mean to claim that Facebook's done nothing wrong. But ultimately, there are uncomfortable tradeoffs involved in friendship-as-a-service. Expecting an completely non-creepy version of Facebook is like expecting a completely non-controversial version of government.
Strange comparison. We should remember that the difference between a government and a company is who owns them. Governments are owned by the people, and many times throughout history, it became obvious to the population that they could not trust a private company to manage their fancy new communication network. And so, they had their government do it, so that they would have a say. That’s what democracy is all about.
They aren’t new problems. Facebook provides communication, not friendship. The friend component is just a network address book of sorts, effectively no different from a phone number. If the phone company were allowed to replace phone numbers with references to a centralized lookup table, they would certainly do it. But it’s illegal, thanks to over a century full of public outcry and contentions just like these.
Of course there are several attempts at building a decentralised 'social' network like this, e.g. Diaspora and GNU Social. Thus far they have not taken off other than in limited circles.
The use cases of automatically adding your friends pictures and birthdays to matching phone contacts was awesome when I first used it in college. Games like Words with Friends are a lot more fun when I'm actually playing with people I know. Not everyone discovers and plays games at the same time so its nice seeing when someone new starts playing and also knowing not to pester friends that stopped playing long ago.
Being connected with actual people I know is nice, I just hope it doesn't all have to go away because there are so many people out there trying to abuse the data.