I was; I clearly mention it when relevant. I left to work on Deliveroo; I’m now at Booking.

I also wrote a PhD on how to implement monopoly enforcement to the company and I’ve published my critical understanding of the company’s position for more than ten years prior to joining the company, at academic conference, on my blogs, on Quora, occasionally here. I was the first person to write scary things about Facebook, probably in 2005.

As I wrote repeatedly, the company has a ton of issues and is generally extremely open about it (that there are, less what they are specifically). The trawler approach to data gathering was one of them. Thank you for pointing that out: focusing on real problems is important. Facebook has been fixing aspects of that repeatedly, but it is hard: some data gathering or sharing is actually relevant and expected, so you can’t cut things without understanding what you would break -- a clear strategy change in the last three years.

Why not do more faster? Because the company is already trying to respond as fast as they can. Employees and ex-employees are indeed more tolerant of this because we know personally of the insane amount of work there is to do; prioritisation, i.e. the arbitrage between your most and second most important task, what you do now or later is insane. I left the company to work in a more balanced environment that happened to be the fastest growing start-up ever, where I got woken up ever night at 4am because scaled killed our database again, migrating to a more scalable technology every four months.

Facebook had to reconsider offering services like targeting based on what Experian knows about their users, who I believe are almost exclusively American resident. I don’t think that has to do with GDPR because it’s not on the same continent but I’m not privy to details. EU citizen living in the US or Americans who moved to the EU are both large enough demographics to warrant caution.

They were not hiding the feature because there was an expectation from Americans that their credit card companies sold economic data; Facebook just made that integration easier -- I’m assuming as a reaction to how common a source of Custom Audience that was. If you didn’t like it before, you could hide it on https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/ with a click.

After the CA scandal, American became more sensitive to those approach and Facebook responded, almost instantly -- so fast advertisers are a little confused. That balance, pro-users, is also something that anyone familiar with the company, investors, board members but also employees can confirm: there is a strict hierarchy when one of the four “orgs” objectives disagree. Security is always right; User Engagement takes over Advertising.

Every business in Europe has to accommodate to GDPR, mainly processes but all advertising-based company massively so; one would in denial if they think that’s not the case -- the text is still widely open to interpretations. The fact that Facebook had the least amount to change is indeed telling. What you notice is the scale of the company, the prejudice and the attention. What you are missing is in front of you: Facebook is very willing to admit its wrongs and fix them.