In the wake of the latest Facebook data breach catastrophe, Josh
Constantine rounds up more than a decade’s worth of major catastrophes
wrought by Facebook’s recklessness, greed, and foolishness, from Beacon
to the “Engagement Ranked Feed” to the “Engagement Priced Ad Auctions”
to the choices that created spamming games like Zynga’s offerings, to
the mass overwriting of privacy preferences, to “ethnic affinity” ad
targeting, to the Real Names policy and the stalkers it abetted to
Facebook’s global anti-Net-Neutrality campaigns; to self-serve ads; to
developer data access and the gift it handed to crooks like Cambridge
Analytica.
I’d actually forgotten about some of these; in some ways, Facebook is
the Donald Trump of Big Tech, such a font of shitty behavior that it’s
impossible to remember all of the scandals, or even all of the biggest
and worst ones.
