I was working at Facebook when the CA story broke, but not when the events happened. I was in a department far removed from any of the involved parties. I haven't worked for them for several years now, and I currently own no FB stock outside of broad-based index funds¹.
As I recall, the sense of unfairness that was going around was rooted mostly in it feeling like old news. CA was the ghost of a bad policy that had already been rescinded, and there was very little awareness of that in the media coverage. Instead, there were loud calls for Facebook to do something, but every reasonable thing had already been done years before.
When I worked there, nobody believed that the policy which birthed CA was a good idea, which is why it was long gone. Also, everything had played out already in the public eye (in the tech press) -- anyone who had been paying attention should have known about most of these things already.
¹ It seems silly to make all these disclaimers, but they seem necessary with the mood here.
I remember all the puff pieces when Obama's campaign did something similar in 2012, where his app would drink down all the data it could from the social graph. When CA broke, I was asking people why they thought this was news and why I only used Facebook to shitpost on company pages, it wasn't exactly a well kept secret that you could do that.
There may have been effort to stop it from happening again, but from the outside it seems there has been zero effort to mitigate the harm already done, I don't think Facebook contacted anyone to tell them their very personal data had been downloaded by a third party because one of their Facebook friend participated in some poll, and that they would now be targeted by very personalized political propaganda .
As I recall, the sense of unfairness that was going around was rooted mostly in it feeling like old news. CA was the ghost of a bad policy that had already been rescinded, and there was very little awareness of that in the media coverage. Instead, there were loud calls for Facebook to do something, but every reasonable thing had already been done years before.
When I worked there, nobody believed that the policy which birthed CA was a good idea, which is why it was long gone. Also, everything had played out already in the public eye (in the tech press) -- anyone who had been paying attention should have known about most of these things already.
¹ It seems silly to make all these disclaimers, but they seem necessary with the mood here.