Now would be a good time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
However; that would make me lose all playlists, stored music and I'd have to move my subscription around. Too much hassle at the time.
Going to try the trick you just posted.
I feel this Cambridge Analytica story is a bit overblown. When the whistleblower says “target their inner demons”, he is just referring to campaigns placing Facebook Ads with certain parameters about who should see them.
Now the question of political targeting data being re-purposed from a personality quiz app, and issues of data privacy in general, are worth investigating. But the fall in Facebook stock price is a giant overreaction (unless the story invites legal regulation.)
The shock of Trump’s election and Brexit have prompted more scrutiny of social media, which is warranted. But there’s a limit to the benefit of worrying about Youtube algorithms, Facebook targeting, and Russian trolls. Changing the political situation will mostly require old-fashioned door-to-door politics.
Clinton won the popular vote. She won CA for example, so clearly Cambridge didn't mush people's brains up that much. The swing states in the Midwest she didn't win she didn't campaign in. Is it that hard to understand?
Why do we have to constantly relitigate 2016? If you don't like what Trump is doing, why not fight against that instead of this constant reporting and talk of conspiracies? People who peddle/love this stuff are taking away the wrong lessons from 2016.
The data from the quiz wasn't repurposed. The data from the quiz itself has nothing to do with this. The quiz was merely a gateway to get the user to hand over a laundry list of their profile data on themselves and all of their contacts.
Fine, let's assume that that's true. Facebook did indeed do some useless things. But how is this a reason for its CEO to resign? Facebook did nothing wrong! Yes they failed to become better, and their platform became bloated, but so does every other platform in the world at the moment. But since when is failing to become better now suddenly a really good incentive for it to buckle down completely like the article is suggesting?
I feel the article's argumentation is completely unsound. Premises I have no say about, but its conclusion definitely doesn't follow from those premises.
The author didn't even rein in the privacy stories that are all over the news suddenly. Now that would give their argument leverage, but they didn't.
Go hate Facebook all you like, I do too, but this article doesn't make sense and doesn't deserve to give a reason for you to hate the company or its CEO.
If this was Reddit, I'd suggest the mods pin a megathread to contain it but HN doesn't work that way. I'm generally against heavy moderation but at this point I'd vote for a moratorium like we did with politics awhile back.
There aren't very many more entities left to blame, tar and feather for his election at this point.
This is some serious cognitive dissonance to expect to be free to share personal data but to still retain privacy regarding those. Anything you share with your friend can then be shared to a 3rd party. This is even true in "real life"
And data is not nearly as powerful as we make it to be. Populism did not win because of social networks, populism won because of increasing inequalities in both wealth and skills in a world where globalisation and automation are making more and more people uncomfortable about the future.
All data did is to identify who is who and sell them what they actually wanted. The problem is not about using data to understand audiences. It is about having people lacking enough common sense to actually check if they are told the truth. It is also about the eagerness of politicians to play with tribalism of any kind. Western democracies are responsible of those failures and they are trying to find anyone else than themselves to blame.
I left Facebook a few years ago and I don't regret it. I doubt that Facebook is worth it for most people and WhatsApp with SMS is enough for me. People more social that me could leave FB to go to Instagram though. So in any case Zuckerberg is fine.
The only way to beat Facebook is to give people an alternative they prefer. It is definitely not to try to scare them with data scandals most of them don't care about.
I always think about pre-facebook era and want to go back again to those times.
It was only after, stories about his missing "statements" started to appear that he came forward.
Sure, that sounds feasible given how just a day ago everyone went after Zuckerberg for keeping silent and a day later he releases a statement.
Adding to this list how failed to us with Parse.com
This is a stellar opportunity for this community to have some introspection. Are we capable of it? These kinds of posts are a mirror to what we badly want to be true, whether it is actually true or not. We, apparently, badly want Facebook and even moreso Mark Zuckerberg to fail. Why do we want that so badly?
They're obviously not the only company at fault, but they're one of the biggest.
That open and free web is still out there, and as a non-FB user, that's the web I see every day. OK, my RSS reader remembers the URLs for me, and some of the sites are a bit bloated (which we have browser add-ons to fix), but there's definitely lots of good independent content still out there (and I've found lots of it by reading HN).
But then Facebook decided they needed to make some money. So they started allowing advertisers to inject things into your feed. They often tried to hide it in the form of "things liked by a friend of a friend", but it was still obvious.
To make even more money, Facebook decided to do away with the pure chronological feed, and they replaced it with something much more vague. The vagueness of it all made it all that much easier for them to inject "recommended" content that they were getting paid to show to you.
Nowadays, Facebook is completely unrecognizable. The vast majority of a typical Facebook feed is nothing more than memes, ads, and the equivalent of shitty email forwards. Scattered throughout the noise are just enough tidbits of things you actually want to see, from friends and family. Just enough to keep you hooked.
People put up with it, but a sort of deep resentment has started to take hold. A lot of people are sick of being farmed by ad companies. They are tired of being a product. They are tired of seeing nothing but ads and stupid, tired memes. They long for the content and direct connection that made Facebook popular, but alas, it is never coming back. That kind of content doesn't make money for Facebook.
I personally find it disgusting. If you don't like the service, stop using it and shut up.
It’s important to remember that you’re trading with other people. Regardless of the contract or their policy: it’s just humans on the other side with all the usual trappings.
But then, I’m one person and not all hacker news readers.
I can tell you my reasoning. Facebook latches onto a deep human need (for social embedment and human interaction), and cynically pushes a hollow substitute of that, while dishonestly invading your privacy, for money.
Our body craves nourishing food and wholesome, sweet fruit, and has evolved preferences for fat and sugar. Then, today, along comes McDonalds and serves BigMac and Coke, carefully engineered for maximum alignment with our taste receptors at minimum cost.
Facebook is the McDonaldisation of social. It's carefully engineered to exploit the hooks in your brain to keep you online as long as possible, make you reveal as much about you as possible, and come back as soon as possible.
But it's even worse. McDonalds at least sells its stuff honestly and employs lots of people, somewhat ameliorating inequality.
We here on HN know how Facebook monetises: data and ads, but most people did not know the details and depth of the tracking - that's why this story is such a ruckus.
Facebook scales easily, so you get a few (relatively speaking) very well paid people, worsening inequality.
And does it bring anything positive? Before Facebook, people were meeting, organising in clubs and associations, and communicating just fine, using newsletters, the phone, later mailing lists, etc. Increasingly now, with some organisations, it's hard to even stay informed or be invited to events if you refuse to use Facebook!
Lastly, what galls me with Zuck is the pure hypocrisy. Talking about how nobody wants/needs privacy anymore, but purchasing the 4 houses around his in Palo Alto to have more privacy.
Oh, and FWIW, your Econ 101 textbook free market can't fix this, as that theoretical model is predicated on full information and negative economies of scale.
TL;DR: To me, Facebook is a despicable cynical near-monopolistic money making machine (for the few), run by a hypocrite peddling a fake, counterproductive "solution" to real human needs using the worst form of monetisation in a dishonest way.