Because the entire rest of society has wrapped itself around Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram. It is easy to be a free software purist until you need to know if your child's school has a snow day. Websites and mailing lists are dead. I cannot be involved in my child's school or any of the informal social networks around the parents and teachers without using Meta's platforms. I cannot volunteer at a non-profit I care deeply about without using Meta's platforms, because that's what they have to coordinate.

Are you going to suggest to me that I should force them onto Signal and a pile of other DIY platforms? I dare you. Look a burned out parent in their bloodshot eyes first.

Because super vast majority of the population doesn't care. You can just look at the leaks from the last decade and its outcomes. Every company that deals with socials also know that people only care about their privacy within their own small circle. As in, they only care about privacy within their own small bubbles.

Imagine a small local non-profit with 5000 likes on their page. They might be trying their darnedest to improve their newsletter numbers, but they still need to be on Facebook.

Imagine that times a billion.

Easily.

The alternatives are also probably up to the same sketchy shit, so your choices are to be a hermit, or accept that your services will spy on you.

If you want to participate in society, you have to either trust a very large list of untrustworthy people... Or acknowledge that they are untrustworthy, and mitigate accordingly. Part of that mitigation is accepting the possibility that if the Mossad want to murder you by blowing up your toaster, nobody's going to stop them.

Signal lagged so far in polish and features that getting friends and family to use it was doa. So I can choose to communicate with friends and family on the apps they use, or I make it very difficult for them to communicate with me.

That ends with them mostly not communicating with me, not with them switching apps.

Interesting, you say Facebook didn’t listen to anyone’s audio, yet they themselves admit their contractors routinely did: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/13/facebook-...

They even paid them to do transcribe chats: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-13/facebook-...

And this is just the publicly known stuff. So perhaps you weren’t privy to everything?

So Facebook (not Meta at the time) just “forgot” to turn off the camera after they were done with it? Sounds reasonable… except wait, they were actively re-activating it while you were scrolling, and until iOS 14 users were none-the-wiser. If it was an honest mistake, do you think FB testers would have not caught it during the MONTHS between iOS 14 developer preview and release? And yet, for this one I do think it was probably a bug about when to activate the camera.

https://medium.com/macoclock/apples-ios-14-catches-facebook-...

Are you doing one of those 'a lie requires intention, and we can't know their internal state of mind, so we can't know if something is a lie unless they tell us' things?

Do you consider misrepresentation a lie?

If there's a lawsuit which determines that Meta misrepresented something, do you consider that a lie, even if Meta says it was merely on honest mistake made in good faith?

If the European Commission "fines Facebook €110 million for providing misleading information about WhatsApp takeover" and that "contrary to Facebook's statements in the 2014 merger review process, the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook and WhatsApp users' identities already existed in 2014, and that Facebook staff were aware of such a possibility" then that statement was not actually a lie, right, because no one at Facebook said they lied, correct?

Can you give an example of any company which has lied, but where the company officials have never agreed with that conclusion?

There is a long history in the US of companies having to pay a fine but never accepting responsibility. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/paying-a-fine-bu...

From https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-whatsapp-merger-europea...

The European Commission has found that Facebook provided “misleading information” about its 2014 takeover of WhatsApp following an investigation into the deal.

The commission’s complaint relates specifically to the sharing of user data between Facebook and WhatsApp. In a submission to the EU made in August 2014, Facebook said it would not be possible to create a reliable automated system for matching users. In August 2016, WhatsApp announced that it would be linking WhatsApp user phone numbers with Facebook user identities.

I recommend "Careless People" by Sarah Wynn-Something

We care about your privacy

Ha. This is why the best lawyers in the world work for these people. Over drinks, when I brought up some of the blatant dark patterns in the ad market, someone who worked at one of the biggest companies in the world responded to me bluntly: "yeah, sure, but have we ever lost a case in court over click fraud? No, we have not."

Congrats on living under a fucking rock. How can you be so oblivion to such an obvious thing? The question should be, when have they ever not lied?

Does web-to-app tracking through localhost on Android that is illegal under GDPR count?

Also people found out and nothing happened?

So literally no downside to putting a backdoor and lying about it

Even after we found out, nobody cared...

He literally did his work. He worked two jobs.

TBF, no-one's as-yet found a Meta binary doing this.