What a pretty picture capitalism is. Break out the popcorn for the latest regular installment of “ok for me but not for thee”:

People You May Know employs tons of shady stuff Facebook doesn’t reveal and has saved their bacon early on from stagnating at around 100M users.

https://mashable.com/article/people-you-may-know-facebook-cr...

Facebook Beacon and others had a big outcry. They got hauled into Congress multiple times. And of course whenever they get caught, they always throw a “mea culpa” and do it all over again in a year under a different name. Here they are recording faces of their users secretly using camera permisions!!

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/facebook-app-recording-ca...

Their entire business model is “Give us all your data for free.” Mark Z early on was flabbergasted himself when he realized he no longer needed to scrape sites on Harvard’s house websites and could just ask people to submit the data for each other: “They ‘trust me’, dumb fucks.”

https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...

Proceeds to build entire business on this data…

BUT THEN. Someone else does it to them and they get mad. “You can’t scrape us!” LinkedIn tried this:

https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/court-rules-that-da...

And it’s not like capitalist enterprises even try to be consistent in their legal complaints:

https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/14/apple-calls-out-meta-for-hypo...