> and something that privacy advocate keep missing.

The majority of privacy advocates understand that distinction, it's just that our criticisms of Facebook go beyond that distinction to a bunch of other issues. If you want to talk about nuance, then tackle those issues. Tell me why Facebook is choosing not to notify users about this breach. It's really, really convenient that a supposed lack of nuance is an excuse to avoid talking about privacy breaches and bad policies across the board.

I mean, to be blunt, it sometimes just feels kind of insulting. I'm supposed to believe that Facebook would love to talk about what went wrong here and why an authentication issue and a clear vulnerability in their API is being labeled as a "scrape" instead of hack, but instead they have to be silent about the entire thing because nobody on Hackernews would understand their "nuance." Come on.

And I really do believe that the majority of complaints that most people have about Facebook are not related to API access. It's ridiculous crud like misusing phone numbers that were intended for authentication. It's this leak that we're talking about right now. It's the propaganda and fearmongering from official accounts and press releases that's being spread about iOS's new privacy changes. It's tying unrelated products like Oculus into Facebook accounts after customers were assured that wouldn't happen. It's not just accepting information about me from other people, but aggressively targeting those people to get that information. It's everything that happened with Instagram and Snapchat.

I am perfectly willing to talk about nuance in the very narrow case of Cambridge Analytica, and in the very narrow instances where "who owns information about me" is actually relevant to what Facebook is doing. But I don't think Facebook is desperate for nuance and just can't get anyone to have a productive conversation, I think Facebook is using nuance as an excuse to avoid talking about the litany of issues it has in other areas.

> There’s a lot of people at Facebook

This is a weird point, because it plays both sides of the issue. I'm supposed to excuse a lot of bad messaging coming out of Facebook because the people saying it might not represent the full company, but I'm also supposed to ultimately say that Facebook as an entity is trying to do the right thing. I'm supposed to trust "Facebook" with my data, not an individual team.

So it doesn't make me feel better to label Facebook's messaging teams as un-unified, it just makes it harder for me to trust anything that comes out of their mouths because nobody seems to be willing to say "this is what Facebook believes as an organization." This is one of the most powerful social media companies in the world. At what point does it become reasonable to ask the company to get its crap together and present some unified messaging?

Or, alternatively, if Facebook is so gigantic that it contains multitudes of different teams that have different motivations and messaging and its impossible to think of it as a single entity, at what point does it become reasonable to ask Facebook to stop representing itself as a unified entity and to stop pulling products like Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp closer and closer to its main services where upper management and other teams can interfere with their operations?

The argument you're making about a disjointed company is a really strong case for having some good data silos, and based on your other comments it seems to me that you're saying data silos have gotten considerably worse since 2016 because the company wants teams to more easily integrate and collaborate with each other.

I guess what I'm saying here is, when I sign up for a Facebook account who am I trusting? Am I trusting a specific team? Can I get to choose which teams I trust with my data? When a press release comes out from Facebook, will all the authors and chain of management behind it be identified? Because if Facebook wants me to treat it like a unified entity, then I'm going to do what it wants and treat it that way. It can't have it both ways.