I completely agree, re: HN paranoia around FB. I feel like the engineers lose their minds (speaking as one) and need the FB boogieman to exist. Is there no room for the (very plausible) explanation that a group of people had benevolent intent yet the wheels fell off when they didn't understand the scale of what they were working with?

This happens all the time at work for many of us, we underestimate scale and shit breaks. I don't know why the same logic can't be applied to Facebook, albeit taken to the extreme, being one of the biggest data hoarders on the planet.