> But at the same time, realize that Facebook is not some giant monolith. These are thousands of teams, working in a highly bottoms-up, impact-oriented culture.
Okay, but let's cycle back around to your original point.
A bottoms-up culture in which mistakes like this can happen is not a culture that is responsible enough to hold information like my phone number, address, credit card information, etc... It's not competent enough to manage a voice assistant, or to have access to my contacts.
We're kind of dancing around the original poster's confusion, which was:
> "On the one hand I picture a classic clueless business people driven culture driving poor demotivated engineers and so stuff like the latest hack happen."
> "But then, I see this other picture where teams of quite functional teams are doing good engineering."
But you're not reconciling those pictures. You're trying to paint a picture of a good organization that means well and that is constantly getting better, but that also makes giant mistakes like misusing data and breaking data silos because it's too large to manage and because the culture encourages playing fast-and-loose with data.
The question is, when Facebook starts collecting IDs to validate accounts, when Facebook starts releasing voice assistants, or trying to launch a currency, how can we confidently say that these mistakes won't keep happening? Because to just say "people aren't infallible" isn't enough when talking about an organization that wants this kind of power and insight into everyone's information.
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So here's how I reconcile those pictures: Facebook has talented people employed who like to believe they're doing the right things. But they're not willing to take this seriously or to really think about the impact of their products. Facebook is not holding off on collecting data because they're worried they might leak it. Facebook is asking people to verify information, they want your cell phone number, they're collecting PII on people who don't even have accounts. They want people to send money over their chat app, and to talk to businesses using their platform, and to schedule events, and to link their contacts, and send their location. They want basically all of the data, and none of these leaks has changed their attitude towards data collection.
So I don't think Facebook is incompetent, I think it's about average just like most other businesses, but the difference is that it wants to be seen as a highly competent, infallible company that's worthy of unprecedented access into people's lives until something goes wrong. Then, once everyone's phone number is leaked, it falls back on the "pobudies nefect" card, just like it already has so many times before.
And I think that's a big source of anger, because it's hard to look at that behavior without coming away with the idea that the company is either malicious or just grossly irresponsible. No, they're not malicious in the sense that they literally want to leak your information, but they're clearly not losing sleep over the fact that they're putting your information at risk, even though they've demonstrated over and over again that they can't keep it secure. I don't know what a good word for that is. If not "malicous", maybe "callous" or "uncaring"?
Facebook is a group of average-to-talented developers and managers who are nevertheless unwilling to take the steps necessary to actually protect my data, and they're actively hostile to me keeping my data from them (remember, phone numbers were leaked here from accounts that had been deleted, from people who had signaled that they did not want Facebook to have that information any more). So maybe Facebook devs "care" in the abstract sense, but they don't appear to care in any of the practical ways that really matter.
And I'm just so tired of people telling me that the culture at Facebook is changing when it is so clearly not changing. Facebook devs have been saying the same thing to me after every controversy for over a decade at this point. I'm excited that we're no longer experimenting on depressed teens, and now we've graduated to leaking every single phone number online, trying to cover it up, and then claiming to press that it's not a real leak. Maybe in another 10 years we'll only be misrepresenting impression numbers to advertisers. Progress!