It's been a bad week for Facebook. Although, given the origins of the past days' fallout around the Cambridge Analytica saga, it's really been a bad few years, largely of Facebook's own making.
The social media giant knew all along what was happening, but chose to respond with hand-wringing only once the worst of the dirty washing came out to air.
A blog post this week by two vice-presidents - the company's chief privacy officer for policy, Erin Egan, and deputy general counsel Ashlie Beringer - summed up both Facebook's dilemma and why it is the architect of that dilemma.
The title of the post, "It's Time to Make Our Privacy Tools Easier to Find", goes to the heart of the culture of most of the tech giants that own the world's personal data.
Users and the media have for years demanded greater transparency and simplicity in privacy settings. The time to make the tools easier to find was years ago.
The same applies to tools for reporting abusive content, misleading advertising, fake news and general misuse. The tools offered by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube are blunt instruments that work as a bludgeon when one is required, but are useless in policing bullying, racism and nuanced abuse.
Must we wait for major tragedies before "it's time" again?
The fact that bot armies can still be created to push a political agenda on Twitter - we saw it as recently as the ANC elective conference - and that individuals can still receive death threats on Facebook, as happened to a colleague this week, shows just how unintelligent their supposedly advanced algorithms are.
The fact that YouTube is a haven for the vilest of interest groups, that it offers succour to the liars and fools who punt absurd flat-earth conspiracy theories and dangerous urban legends about how aircraft contrails are really chemtrails used by governments to drug their citizens, tells us how badly it manages content.
When breastfeeding is regarded as more harmful to "community standards" than beheadings, you know there is something seriously wrong with the standards applied by these tech giants.
Content and abuse are just pieces of the puzzle, though.
Google should prepare for its own public relations disasters. Any owner of an Android phone - which is now in the vast majority of smartphones in use - has wrestled with forced permissions when installing a new app.
On older versions, for example, Facebook demands access to SMSes, contacts, calendar, camera, phone calls, location and even microphone.
When asked, it explains each of these away as being needed for specific situations, like sending confirmation codes via text.
If it earnestly believed in users' privacy, however, Facebook would demand that access only when it needs to send such codes.
Google, for its part, should prevent developers from requiring blanket access to personal data in order for their apps to be used.
Those permissions should be requested only at the moment they are needed for an app to function.
Here Google utterly fails its users in favour of app developers. Much as Facebook did when it enabled Cambridge Analytica's abuse of both its user data and of the world's democracies.
Goldstuck is the founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter @art2gee and on YouTube
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