Sheryl Sandberg: Want Privacy? Must Pay to Use FB | Hacker News Reader

Sheryl Sandberg: Want Privacy? Must Pay to Use FB

today.com

9 pointsmudil21 comments

It looks like you rewrote the tutorial to editorialize. That's against the site guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

She clearly says in the interview what my title says. But that's OK: HN/YC being a supporter of startups seems to be too much in love with FB and Google, the behemoths that keep the above mentioned startups from rising up and allowing YC to profit like it should. Paradox to me...

I believe you about the interview, but it isn't ok to cherry-pick one detail from a piece and make that the title. That's a form of editorializing.

> HN/YC being a supporter of startups seems to be too much in love with FB and Google

I doubt most users would agree, after the onslaught of stories in the last few weeks. You might be falling prey to this bias:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22hostile%20media%20effect%22...

(I don't mean that personally btw—it's one of the most common phenomena we see here.)

"Mark has apologized and I know he is prepared to apologize in any situation". That's pretty funny.

Anyway, the title is wrong. All she says is giving users the option to completely opt-out of targeted advertising on their platform would be a payed product.

There's a reason why Facebook and all the others don't offer paying for their services. They want to be able to tell advertisers that they can reach X amount of people. If X gets too small advertisers lose interest and they have to charge paying customers more and so on. I guess at some point somebody did a napkin calculation and decided it's not worth it.

Napkin calculation? Really?

It's just an expression meaning they made a lot of assumptions (eg how much people would pay, how many would pay, and at what point advertisers stopped dropping out.) Obviously they never actually tested these assumptions, presumably because their simple models indicated it would be disastrous for the company.

While there may have been literal napkins involved, my money's on a whiteboard or Excel. ;)

Let me just tell you, that unlike you, FB and Goog do not make assumptions, especially a lot of assumptions.

You don't have to make a lot of assumptions to realize doing the math is a waste of time. The group of people most likely to pay for services like Facebook are 20-something year olds with some extra money to spend. That's a group advertisers care very much about. If they're gone your customers (the advertisers) aren't going to be happy.

Sure, at this point you could still hire some company to do phone surveys for you trying to figure out how many of you users would be willing to pay and you can make some kind of educated guess as to how that would affect advertising revenue but why bother, really.

While its true that a layperson usually never knows more about the business than the actual person whose doing it (which I assume was your point), most of the failed products from Goog indicate faulty biz assumptions/inaccurate market survey numbers/overly optimistic market response/etc/etc.

FB's response to this whole thing is been terrible. Zuckerberg and Sandbberg weren't seen for days. And now Sandberg comes out with the defense that "Cambridge Analytica told us so we believed them. We are doing audits to ensure everything is fine now."

And on top of this she even talks about how a privacy focused FB would be a paid product.

I can't help but ask - Seriously? FB doesn't seem even remotely sorry for what happened. Data Breach? Don't blame us, we had legal assurance. Privacy? Don't blame us that will be a paid product.

What do you want them to say? That they are shutting down FB?

Maybe they're doing something proactive to prevent the next exfiltration? Something where they leave a bit of money on the table as a sign of good faith?

Oh, we're talking FB. I'd sooner expect that behavior from GS first.

The reality is probably uglier than we know. The slow roll out of apology really means they're not ahead of the game and expect further leaks and bombshells and can't predict them.

I liked Tim Cook's reply to an interviewer asking him how he'd advise Mark, and his reply was simply "I wouldn't be in this same situation".

How can you monetize your own data within these platforms? Is that a viable alternative to a subscription?

1. You can opt in to data sharing at $X/data or data event used in analysis/ad profiling. This would pay for your free usage of FB and see ads.

2. You can pay for a subscription at $Y/month and see no ads or analysis.

People will just move to the next free service. I guess facebook forgot they mostly replaced classmates.com.

Eventually, a one will take off and won't sell. Facebook will become the next MySpace. Not everyone wants to be bought out.

> they mostly replaced classmates.com

No. They replaced the original friendster.com

Most people that started using facebook after it opened to everyone were older people reconnecting with their past associates.

Since everyone was getting on the new "cool" facebook, and a lot of their kids were already on it. Facebook replaced classmates.com, friendster, myspace, xanga, and many others.

Facebook makes around $5 per user per month [1] Fine, where do I enter my credit card?

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/02/facebooks-revenue-topped-5-p...

I may be in the minority on HN but I for one would gladly pay Facebook say $10/month for added privacy if all my friends were still there.

And if there is a free (subsidized by ads) version for people who don't want to pay I bet you a lot of people will stay.

alternative, i wont pay for fb and I also want privacy

Indeed. This seems to be lost in the current conversation. What do we do about the invasive practices of an entity upon individuals that are not their customers and want nothing to do with the corporation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com