If someone from Facebook PR reads your response, they’d very much prefer me to not engage with you. I’m assuming that’s obvious but happy to explain why. Because they have more authority over communications, the more you write like that, the more they’ll have elements to make the case for "Less is more" and even stricter rules about speaking about the company publicly. You’ll get a message that ignores your specific points. That’s who you trust to draft public statements: they’ll say as little as possible — because that’s the wolf that you chose to feed.

People who you trust with your data are privacy specialists, literally every single of of the best that money can buy. The company is very large and full of people who care about it deeply and the internal culture means that you can’t get away with bad design. Every hacker in the world, starting by the people Snowden worked with, are trying; preventing them from winning motivates a lot of smart people.

You might not like the disjoint between what you hear in the press and the idea that some of the most sophisticate activist are working on making Facebook the safest service out there. That’s because, as I pointed out many times, most of the coverage, including most of the things you raise, is misleading or plain false.

A common pattern is around settings: a piece of information can be visible or used in different context. Someone makes that information open; screen-captures the information being shared. They then change their settings; screen-capture that and then claim that the settings were abused. It sounds too big to be true, so no one will believe they can get away with it, but they do, often. That article is guaranteed to trend; any denial will be buried, or more likely used against the company. Previous scandal will be re-hashed, especially similarly made-up ones.

Some people like me will be outraged. They’ll try to explain that what happened, that truth is the exact opposite of what was reported: "Facebook didn’t commit that, they _prevented_ it. They were the only one who did anything!" We’ll write “I _worked_ on that project personally” “I’m a primary source for this” and that comment will get downvoted and ignored. My comment history is full of those. I don’t think you want me to explain individually why every scandal you raised isn’t something I’d be worried about, but… I’m not. Some decisions were poorly explained (see my first paragraph for why) but the actual, internal motivation was sound. If there’s anyone that worries you particularly, happy to answer specifically.

I understand that I’m asking you to trust a pseudonym on the internet, against literally the entirety of the press and most of the content of social media. Trust me: I know how confusing things are when so many people are trying to gaslight you _about your own job_. It gets weirder because they are some real, bigger issues (that oddly no one cares about). I started early (with my PhD in 2005-2008) so I got into that gradually; I think that has made me able to handle that better than most. But the weight of that constant unfounded hostility is heavy.

I’m simply trying to answer the original question: Why people stay in spite of all the scandals? Because they are genuinely making things better from the inside. Because it’s easy (necessary) to ignore all the noise when, for those that you have more context about, it’s mostly lies.

Many people leave, me included, but that’s generally a far more complicated problem, related to the fatigue that this dichotomy carries, and internal priorities.