The news media has a way of using the "wave". The barrage of articles with FB caught with it's hands in the "cookie jar" will contiue piling up. And a lot of them are just trying to get on in the action but some - like this one here - are genuinely upsetting and need to be reported.

The issue here is not the business model of FB but the sneaky ways it tries to make it seem something completely else. While the audience here at HN and similar forums are more than aware of the business model, I'm pretty sure if I asked my mum about it, she'd draw a blank or would not be completely informed. It's to a population like this who are most likely to fall for dark UX patterns and other shady ways FB uses for getting an uninformed consent.

And that's not right. I think, the outrage is not about the business model as much as it is about (un)informed consent. Sometimes - like in this story - almost while cocking a snook in the face of regulatory authorities.

>> Am I the only person who is getting annoyed at these increasingly hysterical articles shrieking about Facebook’s supposedly deceptive practices?

I don't know about that, but a few years back, when joining Facebook was all the rage, I, personally, was getting very annoyed at every other article in the press reporting what happened on Facebook and having everyone I met asking me, first for my facebook, then why I don't have one, then looking at me as if I was an alien when I explained I didn't want to hand over my personal data to some internet company.

From my point of view, this is not hysteria, it's a backlash brought on by the adoption of a fad by people who never considered the consequences of their actions and who only now start to wake up to them.

And I fervently hope that the current fad, of dissing facebook, will keep for at least as long as the fad of joining it has kept on.

i’d pay for a facebook that didn’t track me everywhere for advertising, reorder friends’ posts in order to “maximise engagement”, and generally had a user experience that was driven by... yknow... user experience

taken another way, why would you pay for email when you have gmail? well there are plenty of people that do! i’m one of them, because it provides a far superior experience, and you know exactly where they get their funds from