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Can anyone tell me what’s going on with Facebook? I haven’t used Facebook in 7 years. Sorry for living under a rock but I don’t get what’s so bad about Cambridge Analytica. It seems the information they scraped is publicly available regardless of permissions. Likes? Who your friends are? I’m not sure..

I know I am probably late to the facebook drama, but I think taking out of this all is just how genius and evil all those collector companies are.

I would have probably never thought of collecting data off of mechanical turks and quick jobbers, but they did not only think of it, they deployed their system across multiple jobs, scanning more and more data in from all those connected logins, for less than a dollar per profile, which generates atleast 300 profiles on average.

The real question is why is it allowed for a third party app to actually access all that? even if there's a permission for that, why would such exist?

I really can't see why any application would need access to likes, shares, all friends, all their profiles etc.

After all this time I’m still confused, why was Cambridge Analytica such a huge deal? I feel like a lot of people knew this in years prior, that Facebook/Google were scraping user data and activities to use for personal profiles and hence more directed as placement. Stuff like Ghostery, Privacy Badger, Disconnect, Ad Nauseum (rip it’s Chrome plug-in) etc. all focused on not allowing these same trackers to get information, so not like this case just magically busted the doors wide open screaming that all those websites you visited are now in Facebook’s database and no one knew.

I just can’t quite understand why everyone got up in arms after this.

Having just deleted my Facebook profile in the wake of the Cambridge analytica scandal (straw, camel etc) I was wondering..

Does the GDPR which I believe takes effect from May retroactively mean that Facebook will be forced to delete my data properly, not just "after 90 days it becomes anonymized"