Some of it is politics, but some of it is Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly lying through his teeth about failing to protect users' privacy. At a certain point, it stops sounding accidental. At worst, it was malicious enough that they were fined $5B for it (and should have been fined more).
If you're going to make the claim that Facebook is not as malicious as everyone says, you're making the more extreme and difficult to believe claim, and you should cite some sources. As it is, it just sounds like you're not interested in reading about their abuses even superficially.
Whenever there is a big FB story I try and figure out what actually happened. This is often difficult because 95% of the media reporting on it is either entirely wrong, intentionally misleading, or both.
For the recent Cambridge Analytica thing my take away was that a shady third party (CA) violated FB’s TOS by exploiting a vulnerability in their API that FB had sinced locked down. Cambridge Analytica used that to pull more data from the social graph than they should have been allowed to (after a subset of users participated in scammy quizzes) in order to do stupid things with that data.
When I’ve read the rare detailed reporting from FB’s response [0] about how they’re reacting to issues I’ve been impressed.
Zuckerberg’s comments to the public are also pretty detailed and nuanced - atypically rare for a public facing CEO under massive persistent scrutiny.
This is consistent with what I’ve heard from my friends that work there.
[0]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/men-are-scum-inside-...
> The Switcharoo Plan turned out to be an idea whereby Facebook executives would deprecate various APIs that its developer partners depended on for fear that those developers would one day compete with Facebook directly, while publicly announcing that the changes were intended to promote privacy.
https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/11/8/20953623/facebo...
Nothing Facebook says publicly should be trusted.
FB can be concerned about apps like Pikini that damage their brand and concerned about other companies trying to leverage their data in order to build a competitor.
This is a little hard to reason about fairly given the context that the document leak was targeted to make FB look bad by lawyers that had an agenda around a current anti-trust lawsuit from a client that used FB user data to make a bikini photo finding app (not the most ethical bunch).
That said, I'd argue there's no reason FB should have to allow API access to a company that directly conflicts with FB's interests, particularly when they're trying to take FB's data to build a replacement (and it looks like it would trigger some sort of contract discussion initially anyway). A lot of companies remove third party API access for a number of reasons and this ability is typically explicitly specified in the terms of the API access agreement.
Framing it around a privacy narrative to avoid media backlash around API deprecation is trying to get a handle on PR - I prefer when companies are just direct, but given the risk around bad media coverage I can see why they did it.
This entire issue is somewhat distinct from what I was talking about in the Cambridge Analytica case which I think was a bug in the social graph (they were not supposed to be able to crawl as much of it as they could) and this bug was fixed prior (I think years prior?) to the whistleblower from CA releasing details. My understanding was that accessing the data, while technically possible due to the bug, was still in violation of TOS.
Also since I mostly communicate with my mom who is using her big portal the quality is pretty good (since the camera on that one is pretty good).
It’s annoying because the portal hardware is actually really great. I got the big one for my mom and I have the TV one and they work extremely well. I was looking for something that did what the portal does on the consumer market about a year before it came out and nothing existed.
This anti-Facebook stuff is mostly just politics and most of it isn’t particularly in depth or accurate.