Comment by jfager

What is Facebook's reasoning, then, for providing an API to download complete friend lists, location, real names, and other data a user didn't wade through privacy settings to lock down?

Handing information to a company with which a user never wanted to have a relationship is bad when it results in spam-filled inboxes, which end users might notice and directly associate with FB's policies. As long as the potential abuse is hidden from the user's view, though, FB wholeheartedly endorses it.