PC Magazine - USA (2020-05)

The irony is that Facebook was sold to its early users as a privacy-forward
service. You might remember MySpace and how it faded to oblivion after
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painted itself as an alternative to the wide-open world of MySpace.

At this time, “privacy was ... a crucial form of competition,” wrote researcher
Dina Srinivasan, a Fellow at the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale University, in
her Berkeley Business Law Journal paper, The Antitrust Case Against
Facebook. Since social media was free, and no company had a stranglehold on
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needed a .edu email address to sign up for Facebook, and only your friends
could see what you were saying. Facebook made this promise initially: “We do
not and will not use cookies to collect private information from any user.” In
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Users, deciding they favored privacy, decamped en masse.

HOW THINGS WENT WONKY
Later, as Facebook gathered market share—outlasting, outcompeting, or just
buying other services—it tried to roll back some of those privacy promises. In
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the company to track users (whether or not they clicked on the button) on pages
where it was installed.

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