Facebook's Zuckerberg Says the Age of Privacy Is Over (2010)
archive.nytimes.com
archive.nytimes.com
> Yesterday, the web was buzzing with commentary about Google CEO Eric Schmidt's dangerous, dismissive response to concerns about search engine users' privacy. When asked during an interview for CNBC's recent "Inside the Mind of Google" special about whether users should be sharing information with Google as if it were a "trusted friend," Schmidt responded, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...
To what degree does Apple's privacy stance come from selling hardware versus Tim Cook, as a gay man born in Mobile, Alabama in 1960 [1], instinctively understanding why people need privacy?
There were opportunities for Apple to pivot away from privacy. (They no longer just sell hardware. In the quarter ending December 30th, 2017, Apple earned 18% of their net sales from services [2].) But privacy remains a value they choose to ensure they remain incentivized to protect. That isn't the case at Facebook.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook
[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/0000320193180... MD&A
It's the same as how people go outside, go to restaurants, stores, gyms in the public and don't hide their faces because there's no shame in what they're doing. If, however, you as an individual follow them throughout their day, jotting notes on what they're doing, when they're doing it, and with who, you're considered a creep even though you've observed things in the open.
Now imagine a police officer with you at all times, peeking behind your shoulder at any screen you use, writing down everything you type, recording every conversation, financial transaction, web search; charting every location you go to on a map.
> The chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems said Monday that consumer privacy issues are a "red herring." "You have zero privacy anyway," Scott McNealy told a group of reporters and analysts Monday night at an event to launch his company's new Jini technology. "Get over it."
https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/
This rot goes way back.
I will give it to them, they are extremely good in PR and Marketing.
http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-buys-4-homes-...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/23/mark-zuck...
> Zuckerberg reportedly took action after he learned that a developer wanted to purchase one of his neighbor's homes and use the fact that Zuckerberg lived close by as a marketing tactic. He started purchasing the homes last December. Zuckerberg will lease the four homes he just bought back to its current residents.
I honestly believe I would do the same. That developer sounds like a jerk.
Edit: Assuming I had the millions to do it, that is.
"Do as I say, not as I do."
http://gawker.com/5636765/facebook-ceo-admits-to-calling-use...
Awesome. So he's going to give everyone his e-mail login and password, right? Because nobody gets privacy anymore and he's going to lead by example, for sure.
Oh, wait. He means the age of privacy is over, except for hypocrites and rich people who can afford to pay for it.
This kind of hyperbole is not conducive to productive conversation about Facebook or privacy in general.
"I don't know if the balance has swung too far, but I definitely think we're at the point where we don't need to keep on only doing real identity things," he says. "If you're always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden."
https://www.csoonline.com/article/2226288/microsoft-subnet/a...
Zuckerberg said that because that would have benefited Facebook if it became true. It's like IBM now saying "forget Intel and transistors, quantum computers are the future!" (because we happen to make them and be ahead of everyone else in this).
Their dark patterns around deleting your account is one example. Why not just allow people to quickly and easily delete their accounts? Not "deactivate" while they send you photos of your friends, telling you how much they'll miss you. Not soft delete. Hard delete. Commit to allowing users to just leave if they aren't finding value in the platform.
Why do they resist dealing with that kind of low hanging fruit? Do they view offering easy opt-out functionality to present a major risk to the business?
Because as a leader within the org you're watching the company's reputation and share value erode, and having them spend some time on those items would gesture to the community and world that you take the public's concerns seriously.
I'm sure they are already prioritizing developer time on many different privacy fronts, including auditing old apps to see what data they siphoned off. (As was implied by Zuckerberg's interview on CNN)
The clip starts at around 2:30 if you want to see it: https://youtu.be/LoWKGBloMsU
How might we go about deweaponizing information? Does it require anarchical self governance and radical transparency or is there another way?
I propose one key: teaching the world to be emotionally responsible at an individual level. Nonviolent communication provides a clear structure and set of principles to practice to this end.
Really, we either accept that facebook and similar have this advantage, or we do something to keep our information from them.
The other alternative is to run a misinformation campaign against them. Something tor-like but with likes. That'd break the core monetization concept of these kinds of sites though.
Hack the culture.
These things combine to mean that it will always be problematic for everyone to be completely open. The only way to make this a non-issue is to have all judgements made be completely accurate, but that seems like it takes way too much information.
This reminds me of this article about using landfills for raw materials.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180323090958.h...
Well, for everyone but him (see the other thread regarding his house)
Yes, other CEOs may have made similar statements, but they didn't volunteerily give millions of customers data to unscrupulous partners because that's clearly wrong to do. It's the statement with the action that's enlightening, not just the statement.
The lack of any sense of right and wrong within FB's leadership is astounding.
Edit: Before this is censored. Do you honestly believe he is on a mission to make the world more open and connected?
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Sunday, just 41 percent of Americans now trust Facebook to obey laws that protect their personal information. In contrast, of the 2,237 respondents to the poll, which ran from Wednesday through Friday, 66 percent, 62 percent and 60 percent, respectively, believe that Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp. will do a better job of respecting their privacy.
A separate survey released the same day by Germany's largest-selling Sunday paper, Bild am Sonntag, delivered a much more damaging assessment, revealing that 60 percent of Germans believe that Facebook and other social networks have a negative impact on democracy."
Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-cambridge-analyt...
Zuck: They "trust me"
Part of that resentment might be caused by anti-american-bias, anti-capitalist-bias, German romanticism and many more but most importantly remembrance of the GDR's Stasi.
Those 60% you mention sound absolutely reasonable even without the cambridge analytica scandal. I know several people who never registered with facebook or whatsapp and are reluctant to do be pushed into it even by close friends and family.
How many people in Germany use American-made software and services? How many use Windows, macOS or Android? Amazon? Netflix? Uber? Snapchat? Instagram?
I see many Europeans talking about "anti-americanism" yet a lot of them consume their products and culture en masse.
But we still have work to do regarding Google. They are even worse IMO. For those two, you are the product.
Amazon and Microsoft don't have business selling your data (or at least it is not central), you are not the product.
Amazon: https://advertising.amazon.ca/
... You are the product.
Amazon explicitly states that the ads provided are targeted based upon user action. So if you go to Amazon searching for music, they may show an ad on the side of the page that provides a discount offer for a specific band or artist.
As far as I know, Amazon doesn't sell user data to anyone, even for advertising.
After all, this is a company that tracks not only what books you read, but how far you've read it, how much time you spent reading every page and how many times you went back to previous pages.
This is also the company who has microphones placed in people's houses, happily installed by the users themselves.
Given the fact that so many people people trust them with so many things, and their desire to be a provider of every single service, they certainly are a much bigger privacy invader than even Google or Facebook.
In other words, the company is not rotten to it's core.
Microsoft has been giving away their operating system for free in exchange for mining your personal data. Everyone who uses Windows 10 can expect to have everything on screen scraped, all their keystrokes logged, and all their files transferred to Microsoft for analysis.
What do you suppose their reason is for taking all this data?
Who is? Amazon? Not likely. Though I haven't worked there for several years now, I would be flabbergasted to discover that Bezos would approve an initiative that involved selling user data to advertisers.
I can't speak to Microsoft. I am not a user of Microsoft's products, nor any of its subsidiaries' products, and they are not mining any data from me.
No, I was talking about Microsoft only. Sorry if that was unclear.
Not a fan of any of the two companies but I believe you're being unfair.
At least Microsoft[0] does not sell your personal information or build it's business around renting access to your personal information. There is a big difference between sharing data with advertisers and sharing data with company-controlled subsidiaries and vendors.
Amazon is a little more permissive [1] but again, it does not sell your data.
Both of them ask for your consent before sharing the data. So for example, if your friend/contact shares his data, the third party does not see your data (as opposed to what Facebook did).
Posts such as yours reek of whataboutism (same as the Obama campaign narrative) and do more harm than good. The two companies have not built their business around personal data. The personal data in this case is a side-effect of selling an actual product/service which brings in the cash.
If you mentioned Google, then that's a different thing. I find it interesting nobody is bringing up this book: https://www.amazon.com/When-Google-Wikileaks-Julian-Assange/...
[0] https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
"We tell you about things we think you’ll like. For example, we may send you email to remind you about items left in your online shopping cart. We also display advertising in some services, and we’d prefer to show you ads you find interesting."
https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-US/windows10privacy
Microsoft mines your behavioural patterns and activities on Windows, Bing etc and sells this information to advertisers.
Slay one beast at a time, otherwise your thin your army and are defeated.
Google doesn't have a social graph of 2.2 billion people, with all their posts and likes.
And if you don't trust Google, then Bing and DuckDuckGo are a click away. If you don't trust Facebook, there are no real alternatives.
Yes, there are issues with Google. But they're not in the same universe as Facebook.
To suggest otherwise is false equivalence.
https://marketingland.com/google-publishers-user-data-insigh...
>Among the announcements was the launch of a new effort to share user data with publishers and introduce more machine learning into Google’s publisher products.
https://doubleclick-publishers.googleblog.com/2017/10/buildi...
It was turned on by default without user notification.
https://www.privacytrust.com/guidance/facebook_instant_perso...
http://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-instant-personalizatio...
But you're right to point out they used to have 'share by default' on some data.
The search is pretty good and the UI is nice. Maybe you'll prefer Gmail, but it's worth a try at least.
You don't have to use Gmail.
You don't have to store work documents in Drive.
You don't have to log in to watch YouTube.
You don't have to use Google Photos.
But for social networking, what choice do people have when no other service has even 5% of Facebook's social graph?
I do have to store my email and work documents on Google as it's the platform my employer uses.
I really really really really want to like DuckDuckGo, but it simply doesn't work compared with Big G.
I switched my default search engine to DDG once again last week, and after a frustrating week of rarely finding what i want, had to switch back go Google.
Last night was the final straw. I was trying to find out the delivery area for a particular newspaper. All DDG gave me was irrelevant ads, links to the newspaper's home page, outdated links to newspaper pages that are 404 now, and links to Wikipedia and other articles about the city.
Same search query on Google gave me as the first result a link to a page at the newspaper where I could put in a ZIP code to see if delivery was available.
I'll try DDG again in six months to see if its improved, as I have three or four times now. Fingers crossed.
I've been doing this for years as well, and I'm much too lazy to do the !g trick. If you rely on google search daily to help get complex tasks done, DDG just doesn't cut it as far as I'm concerned.
For searches for the latest movie trailer or whatever? Sure it works great, but for me simple queries like this make up a tiny percentage of what I use Google Search for. It's easy to take for-granted now that we are so used to it how incredibly good Google's search results are.
I'd love to move to DDG, I really would, everything else about them appeals greatly to me, but every time I read an article by someone saying the made the jump I can't help but wonder what they actually use it for that makes it work for them.
Quick reminder that if you're using Chrome, Bing and DuckDuckGo do not protect your search history. If you're using Chrome and have web history turned on (you probably do), Google parses your browser history to get your search queries from sites like Amazon, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
It's not as simple as just choosing to move to a different product. Google makes every effort to cross-contaminate their products with each other, precisely so they don't lose any of that information. It's very difficult to give up just part of Google's ecosystem.
Google on the other hand is everywhere, both on your side and on the servers you visit. They probably track less proportionally, but you give them far more data than facebook, no doubt.
With Facebook there simply isn't a replacement that has all my family and friends. There's no way I'll convince them to use something else.
Sadly, I think the only way to replace a digital drug is going to be with a less evil digital drug. It's quite hard to break those habits.