The average user didn’t and doesn’t understand what’s going on at all. When I used Facebook more heavily, I would routinely see memes passed around where people were alarmed to discover Facebook has a license to use+reproduce their photos, and posted legalese on their walls which they believed would revoke that license so Zuckerberg can’t steal them.
The average person who did understand these things, before the mid 2010s, was very passionate about open standards. The zeitgeist at the time was that you should be able to do anything through the API that you can do through the official app; it wasn’t until 2015 (https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/) that Facebook turned off their official API for letting third parties dig through your friends’ entire profiles. If Facebook had announced in 2017 that they’re turning off API access to the timeline, which they ended up doing as part of the Cambridge Analytica response, people would have been very frustrated and would not have believed that it was a privacy-first measure.
The average person who did understand these things, before the mid 2010s, was very passionate about open standards. The zeitgeist at the time was that you should be able to do anything through the API that you can do through the official app; it wasn’t until 2015 (https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/) that Facebook turned off their official API for letting third parties dig through your friends’ entire profiles. If Facebook had announced in 2017 that they’re turning off API access to the timeline, which they ended up doing as part of the Cambridge Analytica response, people would have been very frustrated and would not have believed that it was a privacy-first measure.