There’s a meaningful difference in a company wanting to exploit user data to enrich itself and allowing employees to engage in voyeurism. The latter doesn’t make the company money, and therefore can be penalised at no cost.

Your comment talks about incentives, but you haven’t actually made a rational argument tying actual incentives to behaviour.

My point is that it would be naive to believe that a company whose revenue depends on exploiting user data has internal measures in place to ensure the safe handling of that data. In fact, their actions over the years effectively prove that to not be the case.

So whatever they claim publicly, and probably to their low-level employees, is just marketing to cover their asses and minimize the impact to their bottom line.

There is actually no difference, only a difference in intent.

The problem is similar to that of government efforts to ban encryption: if you have a backdoor, everyone has a backdoor.

If Meta is collecting huge amount of user info like candy (they are) and using it for business purposes (they are), then necessarily those employees implementing those business purposes can do that, too.

You can make them pinky promise not to. That doesn't do anything.

Meta has a similar problem with stalking via Ring camera. You allow and store live feeds of every Ring camera? News flash: your employees can, too! They're gonna use that to violate your customers!