> They are just telling people what they think they want to hear given how they have been caught out.
Wait a second, let's back up. They didn't get "caught" doing anything. They purposely, intentionally, and with everyone's explicit knowledge shared friend list data with an app developer.
This is just a basic fact. No one, not even my mother, can realistically claim they did not know and understand Facebook was sharing graph data with app developers in 2012, or 2014. Not only was it crystal clear when you installed an app, even if you didn't, anyone that was on Facebook was inundated by messages from Farmville, and many other apps, letting them know what their friend's were doing.
Later, by 2014, Facebook decided they needed to be more restrictive with this data. They shutdown app developers access to the social graph, essentially killing Facebook Platform, which everyone expected to be a primary driver of future revenues. They shutdown Graph Search, an extremely useful tool, because it made it too easy to collect personal data.
But we need to be clear that Facebook was not "caught" doing anything at all. They did exactly what they said they would do, which was plain to everyone, even my technophobic mom.
Separately, in 2014, an app developer shared personal data with Cambridge Analytica. Facebook contacted both parties and requested that they certify they deleted the data, which they did.
The only reason people are upset now, is because:
a) politics is involved, and
b) they are retroactively applying current best practices with personal data, which were not common in 2014 and before.
The incredible part about all of this is that so many other social networks (and other companies) continue to collect the exact same data, and many of them share it publicly. Almost all Twitter users have their friend list open to the public, for all to see, along with all of their tweets, because that's what the platform encourages. No one would say Twitter has been "caught" doing this.
In fact, Facebook has been extremely up-front about the situation. They fixed the situation 4 years before it came to light. They have announced important and strong changes to further protect data in the future. They have publicly and and widely announced their detailed findings in this case, and they have promised investigations of similar unauthorized usages of personal data that may have occurred with other app developers.
> Facebook can't seem to behave in a trustworthy manner.
My goodness, this is the same issue, not a new one. Facebook is behaving in a trustworthy manner right now, over-communicating the scope and details of this issue, yet here we are to attack them anew over it.