this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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Not saying that Facebook/Meta aren't terrible but this is a misunderstanding of what happened with Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook didn't sell anything to Cambridge Analyitica. Their API at the time allowed CA to gather information about you and all of your friends when you took one of their free personality quizzes (during the era when 90% of Facebook was people sharing personality quizzes).
When Facebook found out what CA had done, they fixed their API to prevent it from happening again (not because they cared about user privacy but because CA got a bunch of information from them that they could use to target advertisements on their own without paying FB to run ads) and covered it up so their users wouldn't know how massively negligent they had been with their data.
So it's not that Facebook was wantonly selling you data to shady characters so much as they were carelessly leaking your data to any shady characters who happened by.
It may just be me but I feel like that is even worse. Because who knows who got a hold of it now.