This is all chickens coming home to roost too.

If FB had invested in some decent privacy switches and education - instead of trying to dark pattern everyone to just hand over everything - then they wouldn't be in this predicament, because people would already have settled on some suitable privacy settings.

If it's true that 96% are opting out, that just shows what a terrible job FB have done at approaching privacy up until now. After all, why would people opt out of tracking if they trusted the service in the first place?

Everything points to the fact that keeping users in the dark is their business model.

Which, makes sense. The steady erosion of any control, the tiny sparks of "settings" to assuage some privacy issue brought out in the open, the behavior of Zuck in the Congress. It is amply clear that for FB to make money, it's users should have no choice.

I think that's what offends me most about Facebook's whole ham-fisted victim routine. They adopted a business model that was dumbfoundingly, arrogantly unsustainable: trying to fool all of the people all of the time.

Even the smartest, most devious minds in tech should have realized that that gravy train had a limit.

People are opting out because Apple have explicitly barred Facebook from offering them anything as a reward for opting in (other than better targeted adverts, which most don't see as a positive). Obviously if they didn't do this Facebook would use dark patterns (such as crudely gating the entire functionality of the app behind the opt-in) but it's disingenuous to say that this is a free exchange when one party is prevented from bringing anything to the table.

That's an interesting way to look at it. If I understand Apple's position, it's that Facebook can't deny functionality based on privacy settings. But it's less clear to me whether they're prohibited from offering something of actual value. Like if Facebook had a point system—"Facebucks"?—where users could buy stickers/apps in exchange for targeted ads, I wonder if Apple would permit that.

That, I honestly wouldn't have an issue with. If people choose to sell their privacy for something they actually want, that's up to them. It's the shady coercive crap that I despise.