In this case, the user clicked okay on a dialog that said something like "Share my friend list with this application." It would be sane at that point to expect that the application has access to your friend list. The application typically doesn't want to do a "computation", per se, they want to do something like show you your friends that are already using the application, so that you can share things with them and so on.

There are many, many services that share data in this way. iOS and Android share your contact list in a similar way, for example. And those services have the same exact problem, that sometimes third parties leak data. There is no other, better-implemented way for a platform to share data.

In the end, this is a "scandal" because Facebook is getting bad press already for other issues, and people do not really understand the nature of data platforms so they cannot distinguish big problems from small ones.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-blocks-google-chrome-...

https://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-and-zynga-battle-ove...

Many of the initial adopters of the Facebook platform were companies like Zynga that were reliant on specific details of the platform, and got very frustrated by platform changes. Many but not all of the changes that Facebook wanted to make during this period were ones that kept data more private.

Look at how angry the commenters there are that facebook would even consider restricting the access that third-parties have to such data.

Putting control in the hands of the user is quite different from allowing third parties to exfiltrate data on a user without their consent.

(It is worth noting that this approach is still exploitable---third party convinces users to cough up their authentication codes, then acts as the user and makes the request for the whole kingdom themselves. But user education on the amount of power handed to someone when you literally give them your passwords is a separate issue).

So a Facebook user that is friends with you on Facebook says to Calendr, "scan my contacts and generate a calendar that already has my contacts' birthdays and any events they've created on it (one would assume this list would include anything that is shared at the Friends Only and Public tiers) for me."

Three weeks later, Calendr is hacked and all of their data is accessible. A Have I Been Pwned-style service will let you read through the data and sure enough: fixermark's super secret event was now publicly viewed as part of this data set. You do not have an account with Calendr and you haven't even heard of it before.

How would you, as a Facebook user, prevent this from happening beyond not creating the event in Facebook? How would Facebook prevent this beyond not providing the data to the third party?

[1] edit: oh geez, there is a Calendr. This has nothing to do with the real Calendr (this is fictitious Calendr).

Unfortunately, privacy / usability is the tradeoff. Facebook had clear incentives to simplify usability at the cost of privacy. But as a result, these breaches continued to happen.

(I use the past tense here because I don't know what their app ecosystem looks like now. When I was using it, it was extremely easy to do a full friends-of-friends data exfiltration, with the only guard against it being "Don't do that and then dump it publicly for all to see").

(Note that when people talk about data portability they're really talking about federation since social networking can't work otherwise. Non-social data is a little easier.)