Josh Constine at Techcrunch, as I’ve explained before, is sucking a lot of someone’s something over at Facebook.

This time he’s ranting on the Wall Street Journal’ investigation into potential Facebook privacy violations, describing it as a “hit piece.”

Seriously.

He’s railing against an in-depth report about Facebook’s continuing privacy problems. 

If you know anything about Facebook, it’s that the company constantly tramples people’s privacy in order to collect user information for their own uses. It got to the point that FB had to settle with the Federal Trade Commission for failing to live up to its own policy.

Constine concludes: “After an exhaustive investigation of the top 100 Facebook apps, the Wall Street Journal didn’t find any serious privacy violations.”

The WSJ actually concludes: “…most Facebook users still didn’t understand what was happening with their data, according to a study last year by researchers at UC Berkeley. More than half the people surveyed couldn’t tell which types of data a sample app could collect. And about 40% didn’t understand that when an app was allowed to get personal data, it could actually transfer that data out of Facebook and store it elsewhere.”

See what Constine did there? Constine makes it appear that WSJ is “sensationalizing” minor issues with privacy in FB.

In fact, the WSJ writers of are pointing out that A) many users just don’t understand Facebook’s privacy policies, that B) many Facebook apps routinely violate those policies.

Users don’t get that Facebook and the apps on its platform collect much more information about users than the average person would care to give away, even for access to “beneficial” services.

Yes, Constine isn’t a journalist. But I think he should be telling us what his motivation is for being Facebook’s pal. Access? Opportunities? Money? All of the above?