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> Facebook is a corporation, what Zuckerberg wants to do as an individual isn't even relevant

Zuck is a majority shareholder, so what he wants to do as an individual can actually be fairly significant here.

Fair. Perhaps the most salient criticism is that Zuckerberg's top priority is connecting people because his company is designed to use those connections in order to sell lots of advertising.

Advertising is the best way to pay for the servers, lawyers, developers, office space, and everything else FB needs, while keeping the cost for users low.

I believe they are investigating options for letting you pay for FB to turn off advertisements, however.

In the end, it's hard to know for sure what Mark's true motivations are, just as it is for anyone else. The only person who knows Mark's true intentions is Mark. That said, I personally believe him. When I listen to him talk about what he wants to do with Facebook, it seems obvious to me that he has good intentions at heart.

He's about my age, and when I was young the internet let me communicate with people from different areas of the world, different backgrounds, and helped me expand my own understanding of humanity. The internet made me a better person -- a more tolerant, more thoughtful, less prejudiced person. I hoped that the internet could facilitate the same personal growth in the rest of humanity, too. By drawing people together from the disparate corners of the world online, we could become a more tolerant, more understanding species. Mark has said similar things.

Unfortunately, things haven't quite worked out as he, or I, hoped, it seems. =(

about same age too and you express well how I feel about the situation.

We are not done here though, the fight to use the internet to connect the world continues!

Facebook doesn't sell data, it sells ads. It's in Facebook's interest to prevent advertisers and developers from collecting and misusing data so they buy more ads.

Yes but it's in facebook's interest to have the best, most accurately targeted advertising platform. In this case the facebook data CA obtained wedded it to facebook's advertising platform and that's what is in facebook's interest. FB would love to release tons of data to all advertisers because then those advertisers would advertise on facebook. The pressure against this release is negative public perception. So fb's profit motive incentivizes it to walk a tightrope with our data in hand. That's the core problem.

Releasing that information means those advertisers no longer need Facebook to do the ad targeting. They can then use other exchanges to do targeting without paying Facebook anything.

It is in Facebooks interests to guard that information carefully.

Yeah, and sharing it with the political partiy it thinks deserves to win the next election; even if it otherwise guards it carefully.

There's a reason why we have the separation between the head of state, the Church, Congress and the federal courts.

@frgtpsswrdlame could you elaborate how Tim Wu is relevant here? I'm asking from a self-education perspective.

He's done a mini media blitz, which you can see here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/opinion/facebook-fix-repl...

https://www.npr.org/2018/03/27/597221954/facebook-previously...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/mark-zuckerberg-promises-c...

Also there's this older piece from him here:

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/facebook-should-...

Basically Wu has a much more radical critique of facebook which is probably best explained in his own words (from the npr piece):

>I think the problem lies here. It's actually a very fundamental one, which is Facebook is always in the position of serving two masters. If its actual purpose was just trying to connect friends and family, and it didn't have a secondary motive of trying to also prove to another set of people that it could gather as much data as possible and make it possible to manipulate or influence or persuade people, then it wouldn't be a problem. For example, if they were a nonprofit, it wouldn't be a problem.

>I think there's a sort of intrinsic problem with having for-profit entities with this business model in this position of so much public trust because they're always at the edge because their profitability depends on it.

> selling it to developers

FB doesn't sell access to their API. Many other businesses sell access to their API. FB doesn't.

> Also to say that Cambridge Analytica abused the system sidesteps the issue of whether it was in Facebook's interest to allow this data to be collected and then misused.

It absolutely wasn't in FB's interest as this media firestorm indicates. Also, CA purchased data illegitimately from someone other than FB. FB did not sell your data to CA or anyone else. (FB does sell advertisements, and those ads can be targeted to specific types of users.)

> Despite new restrictions how much about me is already out there? That's what I want to know.

FB is coming out soon with a feature that will let you see if CA had access to your profile.

When you buy ads programmatically, and define those purchases with parameters instead of through a GUI, aren't you arguably buying access to an API?

Fuck their profits. Corporations can and are socially responsible at the expense of a few extra dollars.