Facebook was warned about app permissions in 2011
<i>&quot;[Facebook] systems were so laxly designed as to actively encourage vast amounts of data to be sucked out, via API, without the check and balance of those third parties having to gain individual level consent.&quot;</i><p>That is a gross oversimplification of the issue.  There were controls in place to stop excessive data collection. 
 In fact, the only app in this situation that was allowed to &quot;suck out&quot; &quot;vast amounts of data&quot; was the Obama For America app.  According to Carol Davidsen, Obama&#x27;s Former Campaign Director <i>&quot;We ingested the entire U.S. social graph&quot;</i> [1], despite the fact that less than 1 million people actively authorized the app to access their data.  Approximately 99.5% of the hundreds of millions of people whose data Obama took, with Facebook&#x27;s blessings (actively allowing it to bypass its data collection limits for apps), never knew about or authorized Obama to have or use their data.<p>So only one app was &quot;actively encouraged&quot; to suck out vast amounts of data in the history of the existence of the API.  All the rest of them were subject to relatively strict controls, requiring months or years to collect even a small fraction of the data that the Obama app was allowed to collect.  The API was not a data free-for-all, except in one unique case with the explicit authorization of Facebook.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;economy&#x2F;facebooks-rules-for-accessing-user-data-lured-more-than-just-cambridge-analytica&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;19&#x2F;31f6979c-658e-43d6-a71f-afdd8bf1308b_story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;economy&#x2F;facebooks-ru...</a>