> People who you trust with your data are privacy specialists, literally every single of of the best that money can buy.

The best privacy specialists that money can buy are working in an organization that has decided it doesn't have to proactively notify its users about data breaches. That is the wrong decision, regardless of the internal reasoning that brought the organization to that conclusion. There might be a really engaging, interesting, reasonable set of events that led Facebook to make that decision, but it's still the wrong one.

So the picture you end up painting in these comments is of a highly motivated, talented group of individuals with good intentions fighting tooth and nail against an organization that doesn't seem to be listening to them. And honestly, sure, whatever. I can buy that there are experts in Facebook working to make the system better. But clearly they aren't winning.

So we go back to my original point, which is that when I make a Facebook account and when I hear from Facebook's PR team about how asking users for consent to track them is "killing small businesses", I don't get to choose to only trust or listen to the privacy-conscious amazing people who are fighting to fix problems. I also have to trust my data to and get my information from the giant organization of marketers, PR people, advertisers, and managers who make up the rest of Facebook and who seem to have a lot more power than people like you do.

> but the actual, internal motivation was sound.

To expand on the above point about internal motivation, and to address your claim that all of this controversy is just bad faith reporting:

I do not believe you if you say there's a good reason to link Oculus accounts to Facebook accounts and to tear down the data silos between those products. I do not believe you if you tell me that it's OK for Facebook's marketing team to spread FUD about Apple's privacy settings. I do not believe you if you try to play off those issues as misreporting or the media lying to me. They are real things that have happened.

Or if you want to dig in even deeper to things that can't be described as one-off mistakes or miscommunication, you are never going to convince me while actively using a pseudonym online that Facebook's current real-name policy is a good idea. It's a policy that is still problematic to this day, even after Facebook promised to try and make it better. I understand why Facebook has that policy, I understand that there must have been a lot of nuanced conversation internally that led to it, I understand that Facebook has a point of view that makes the organization think the policy is logical. But it's still not a good policy, and we can look at the effects and see that it didn't turn out well.

I can believe you that there were long, complicated, reasonable internal processes that lead to these problems. I can believe you that people didn't wake up in the morning and decide to be evil. But the end results are still bad for privacy -- not because the media tells me they are, but because I'm a functioning human being who is capable of looking at the outcomes of those decisions and reasoning about the world.

Heck, we can even go a step further. You've tried to play off Facebook's API decisions as being about privacy instead of monopolistic behavior. We started this conversation with me pushing back at the idea that people needed to choose between privacy and and interoperability. But your opinion on that is not reflected by Facebook's internal chain of managers, and I'm not basing my opinion on secondary sources. I read the internal emails that were exchanged about its competitor's API access -- not snippets from news sources, I read through the actual leak. You can't play that stuff off as if there's a hidden world that would change everything if only I could see it. Because I personally got to look into that hidden world and see the reasoning that managers were using in their own words, and it was all pretty bad. It's not media bias that's causing that perception.