> This is not a failure of one team "before privacy was at the forefront" (when?).

If that was not a rhetorical question (and I suspect it was) from 2006 to 2016, the main concern around Facebook was monopolies and interoperability. I would know because that was the topic of my PhD. Many people argued for either open protocols (Stratechery regularly, TechDirt did a big piece about it a year ago, WaitButWhy several years ago too) that would allow individuals to extract their social graph (a list of their friends, or information about them) from one service to find them on another service, hoping that this would lower the influence of a single service. It’s graph-sharing tools like those that were key in all the recent “scandals” about the company, often simultaneously blaming Facebook for both not preventing other services from exporting information and being “a roach motel” where information never leaves (per Cory Doctorow).

One particular step involved here, the ability to find friends on Facebook is part of a common priority at Facebook: “growth”. Many people see it as a blind, profit-seeking effort. It’s actually motivated by altruistic means. Outside of the young, educated, technology-savvy classes of the Western World (where most people who could benefit from social tools already know how to use them) having contacts to more friends remains a major positive thing. It’s rarely financially beneficial for Facebook on the short-term to encourage that because it triggers cost without matching advertising revenue (most of the ad sales are still in the US, and to a lesser extend, Europe). “Growth” has lead to several misguided effort, or clumsy attempts (typically: People-you-may-know) but it’s not the rabid unbridled capitalist effort that opponents outside the company like to paint. It was often the primary objective of several teams, outside of interoperability, that contributed to parts of complex systems that ended up being abused later.

One final aspect that the original comment might not have clarified is that those tools are often poorly known, even internally; they can be years old and still hidden after people who built them and are familiar with potential abuse vectors have gone. Many people build other tools that can, in combination, lead to bad things, without knowing what’s there.

The team who build the infamous year-in-review (one guy really) was trying to demonstrate how to share several posts. He was surprised when it was massively adopted, and more so when it was promoted, without consulting him. The people who tried to raise that tool were curious about another question, nostalgia and the relevance of past posts. It lead to one person famously having to re-visit the grief of loosing his mother because no one consulted the team in charge of writing empathic messages. The priority then was not to squander good ideas with committees and encourage every idea, including privacy-preserving projects, and many empathy-defending ones too. I can personally confirm that many projects defending both (privacy and empathy) still massively popular today would not have been released without that third priority of letting individual employees try things without over-burdening supervision.

Until 2016, privacy was not a priority, but a non-negotiable primary absolute. It was enforced by the code (literally: the site is written in Hack, a version of PhP that has access-control hard-coded). Users could not see information they were not supposed to (say, a comment by an ex that had blocked them on a post by a shared friend) because of those hard-coded controls. It was understood to the most that company could do. Confusing situations challenged that absolutist view (like users volunteering whose pages their friends were fans of, something they could legitimately see, through an API, for financial gain) and privacy became not just an absolute condition of any work (that was easy to ignore because pushed one layer of abstraction down) but also a more nuanced approach that required conscious, expensive and sometimes frustrating war-gaming “leaks” through complex adversarial scenarios.

Because of that new priority, Facebook closed a lot of old APIs then, to the dismay of many researchers using those to analyse the company, its practices, including privacy and monopoly position.

> It's a systemic failure of multiple teams and of Facebook's culture of constant privacy infringement and misdirection.

No.