From CATO’s Julian Sanchez:
As anyone who’s uploaded an ill-advised photo from a college party knows, Facebook is where your old mistakes come back to haunt you years later. That turns out to hold just as true for the company itself — a fact executives at the behemoth social network have been discovering to their chagrin this week, amid international furor over the political strategy firm Cambridge Analytica’s illicit access to a vast trove of Facebook user data.
Facebook’s mistake, in this case, was a classic case of taking a good idea too far. The idea was that the company’s massive map of users’ social connections could be put to innovative uses if that data were opened up to outside developers — allowing all sorts of third-party apps to painlessly add a social component.
Unfortunately, the company also made a critical misjudgment: It assumed that if users were willing to share personal information with their friends, they were also willing to let their friends re-share that information.