> Why would people who care about privacy interview with Facebook in the first place?

I believe this may come from the responses to cold e-mails. A recruiter working for FB presents an offer. They want to tell them to GTFO and they highlight the privacy concerns in the response to say thanks, but no thanks.

At least that's what I do when a recruiter working for a company I find morally incompatible approaches me. I reply with something like "The tech stack looks great and my professional experience aligns with what the job description requires. However I don't think I'd feel comfortable working for a <short-term loans | kids gambling | personal data mining> company, but I'm open to hear about similar positions in other areas if you had any in the future."

I think that over the past couple of years in particular, the real-world consequences of all of this have really come into the spotlight.

It's one thing to hear a tech CEO talk about something you may not agree with -- many people just categorize it as "a Facebook thing" (as in, huh, maybe I'll try to use their products less) and move on with their day. It's quite another to come to the realization that non-trivial parts of (what many see as) seriously negative political consequences have come from these products and, being fully aware of these, the CEO/company still hasn't meaningfully acted.

And with all the recent publicity (there's a difference between being mentioned in the technology section of a paper, and giving a congressional testimony), pretty much no one can say anymore that they aren't aware of it, or haven't thought about it.

Mark Zuckerberg does not say he doesn't care about anyone's privacy in the article you cited "openly and repeatedly" or otherwise. I suppose you can infer that from the actions of the company he runs, but your citation does not support what you've said here. Someone reading your comment without reading the entire Guardian article could come away with an incorrect impression of what he's publicly said.

I believe this is pretty true, cause I was interviewing with FB and I brought up some of those questions.

Before the scandal broke out, I didn't really know much about Zukerberg's view on privacy. The scandal definitive rose my awareness on this topic.

But the questions for me is less on FB's approach to privacy, but more on how much is Zukerberg dictating the company. In other words, how much are FB employees empowered to do what's right, to fix their problems. Empowerment and autonomy is a very important for tech talents. FB is not presenting itself too well in this perspective.

The whole Facebook sells data thing is something I see said a lot, but haven't seen anything show. Is there any evidence of this?

Wouldn't selling data be detrimental to their business model of being the golden goose for showing ads to people interested in your product? If people get user data, they can better target people themselves rather than paying Facebook to do it

People often use "selling data" as shorthand for "providing access to groups of people based on what the company knows about them". The two are very similar.

Maybe they’re just more aware of what Zuckerberg is saying now than what he has said and done in the past.

Perhaps developers now value privacy more on average than they did back then.

Yeah, I think it's really common to downplay this as an “everyone knows” situation but there seemed to be a sea-change where it went from “maybe people see more spam than they used to” to “major world events are impacted”.

I'd responded, years ago, to a recruiter's contact email with Zuck's "dumb fucks" IM comment.

Their response was "people change".

Evidence is that this one hasn't. I stand by my response at the time.