Unfortunately it seems that BBC have an axe to grind with former colonies such as India[1], so they're not entirely objective on news related to those areas.
Remember that Facebook is a for-profit company and they will do whatever it takes to keep the money coming in, not giving a shit about what you want and your privacy.
Same goes for any other company such as Google, Apple, Microsoft or whatever. It's not evil, just how it works.
Mining for information in data exceeding peta bytes are not really uncommon anymore. There are even tools in public you can use for it, where Apache Mahout is one that comes to mind.