It's almost like the company he headed made next to no money from selling its users' data.
Sarcasm aside, it's a good quote, but misses the crux of the issue: incentives. User data sharing/selling (whether through partnerships or advertisement targeting) is Facebook's revenue model. Everything else they make money off of is insignificant compared to that. This, I think, is what people mean when they say something is "in a company's DNA": was a dubious partnership with Cambridge Analytica or an only-deceptively-authorized potential collection of contact/SMS data some sinister plot, or the goal all along? Probably not. Was behavior like this considered less-than-scary to Facebook's decision-makers, swept under the rug, or seen as a minor extension of what they already do to make money? Almost certainly.
Sarcasm aside, it's a good quote, but misses the crux of the issue: incentives. User data sharing/selling (whether through partnerships or advertisement targeting) is Facebook's revenue model. Everything else they make money off of is insignificant compared to that. This, I think, is what people mean when they say something is "in a company's DNA": was a dubious partnership with Cambridge Analytica or an only-deceptively-authorized potential collection of contact/SMS data some sinister plot, or the goal all along? Probably not. Was behavior like this considered less-than-scary to Facebook's decision-makers, swept under the rug, or seen as a minor extension of what they already do to make money? Almost certainly.