Facebook is amassing a huge amount of valuable information on every member.
I disagree that the threat of outrage is sufficient to stop the information being used badly. For example, there is outrage against Equifax, but their cache of information has still been compromised. We have seen data leak after data leak from various companies. If a country's spy agencies want to go after the data, they have a lot of resources, from hacking to legislation to physical intrusion or coercion.
Add to that, it seems like Facebook doesn't institutionally care about privacy (probably because it is hard to explain something to someone whose paycheck depends on them not understanding it). For example, http://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com has some very damaging graph searches. Or people who have been outed as gay by incomprehensible privacy settings.
Facebook is a sieve, and the reason to care about them having a lot of information is the same reason to care about privacy in general.
Remember when Target snitched to a teenager’s parents that she was pregnant because her purchases fit the “is pregnant” profile, and everyone got outraged, and they stopped profiling people?
Actually, only one of those things happened, the one in the middle. I'll let you dig into Forbes's "sources" to figure out how they managed to twist a hypothetical into something that already happened.
The author talked to an employee who talked to the man whose daughter was flagged as pregnant. It would be nice if they could have talked directly to the man, but that doesn't seem too distant. In any case, it hardly seems to warrant a scare-quoted "sources," nor would I describe that as "twist a hypothetical."
You have now refuted the story twice in this thread without providing any evidence of its inaccuracies. While I don’t know for certain the validity of the story, you aren’t doing much to persuade me of your position.
I ... don’t know what to say. What they are doing now is respectful?
If we ever come to widespread outrage, it will be much to late. In fact, I don’t think there can be outrage. FB would detect it and make it disappear. Somehow.
Once I realized that, it was hard to think of reasons why their actions are wrong.