I am getting a bit annoyed by how shocked people on here are about this. The friends end point in the graph API was hardly a secret. It is an open API. There was no way for Facebook to enforce that data collected from authorized apps wasn't being saved. It's part of the reason the friends API was put under tighter restrictions a few years ago.
But you're well-versed in this area already, right? The reason that more people are only shocked now is because no one before reported in a way that was accessible enough to the general public. Journalists on the whole are still better at one thing that techies continue to struggle with - investigative journalism & communication.
> I am getting a bit annoyed by how shocked people on here are about this.
Exactly. Didn't people know all the proprietary social networks are spyware+adware? That's the way they earn money. BTW Ghostery says it knows 92 trackers in the social media category.
I tried Ghostery twice and didn't understand it - sites seemed to keep breaking so I go with an alternative method (uBlock Origin + DuckDuckGo extension, and Brave on mobile). Based on this experience, Ghostery is not something I would simply throw on "most people's" computer. I would not for a single moment think that most people (as you implied) understand social networks.
I think we become a part of the problem if we simply assume all users are just like us and know all about the negatives of tech. Facebook evidently didn't anticipate/address it early enough despite all that talent - did they really want this Cambridge Analytica situation to happen? What are we doing to fix this?
Ah fair enough; I think DuckDuckGo's extension does a similar thing with regards to trackers and appears to be easier to use (for me). As for a social network that doesn't spy like the current big ones? I'd go with IRC.
I know people have proposed alternatives like Mastodon or Diaspora*, but I don't think they're good alternatives either compared to gradually giving them up to learn old offline alternatives: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/jobs/quit-social-media...
As for Steemit, I think this "feature" is most absurd. I hope it never takes off:
