The great irony to me is that Facebook does a lot of stuff people should be angry and scared about, but oddly enough the Cambridge Analytica situation, which broke this whole dam open, is not one of them, and is one where I think they are being treated unfairly.
The reason it ends up being an issue is because of politics: it gives people an explanation and someone to blame for an election that did not play out according to the expectations and/or hopes of half of the country.
Yeah, it's important to note that while my anecdote was from the "post-CA timeframe", they had also just had an exploit that resulted in mass harvesting of OAuth tokens[1].
And of course, a couple months later it came out that they were storing passwords in plaintext logs[2].
This wasn't just about CA. There was a class of problems that FB was facing, and the guy didn't acknowledge a single thing they could have done better.
The reason it ends up being an issue is because of politics: it gives people an explanation and someone to blame for an election that did not play out according to the expectations and/or hopes of half of the country.