Facebook Can’t Be Fixed, It Needs to Be Broken Up
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
Fine, I won't. That won't stop society in general being surveilled though, and all the attendant ills of that that the article suggests. Further: more and more apps require me to use Facebook to sign in.
Note they‘ve been doing this for a long time (the article is from 2013).
If you break up the major US tech platforms, it cedes leadership of those sectors to Chinese competitors. Something to think about in discussions about breaking up Facebook, Amazon, and Google.
If you break of the platforms into smaller separate companies, why would that cede leadership to Chinese companies?
> why would that cede leadership to Chinese companies?
It cedes leadership because the Chinese companies, modeled after the un-splintered US platforms, have more resources, capability to undertake coordinated action, and can take advantage of greater network effects.
But I do think the best solution is very strict privacy regulation, similar to GDPR. The so-called free market has failed to manifest a good solution to privacy issues, mostly because the harm done isn't directly visible and hard to contextualize for most people. But it is very real, and can have massive consequences.
They would get over it pretty fast and adapt.
They'll adapt. Facebook isn't even the trendy social network anymore.
It's not like Facebook really does much that's innovative for users anymore. Their only real innovation was to couple a real-names policy along with social exclusivity, but the value to users of that was lost long ago during their race to 2 billion users.
The Chinese platforms could be banned from the US for a whole host of reasons. China does the same to US platforms and they're unlikely to reverse course on that any time soon.
Facebook have broken "actual laws". There are so many cases were facebook have broken the law. [2] [3]
Also, please read up on Fallacy of relative privation ("not as bad as").
[1] https://boingboing.net/2017/11/08/involuntary-profiling.html
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/12/facebook-...
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/19/facebooks-tracking-of-non-...
Yet websites try again and again to load the facebook like button.
As per GDPR, which is in effect but not enforced until May, tracking me without explicitly and clearly asking me if that is okay is not allowed and anything else, like withdrawing service until I agree to be tracked, does not construct consent.
When I visit a new website I do not know if they have facebook like buttons. I have to load the page to check that and without a script or ad blocker I will also load the like button and facebook will track that.
At which point in that process did I consent to any and all scripts on that webpage leeching of my personal data?
Take that up with the websites, not Facebook.
Vast numbers of websites use Google Web Fonts which enables Google to track users. I didn't opt in to that so I just block it.
Visiting a website is not consent for tracking.
So people should know a site uses Facebook share buttons before opening it through Google search. Then, they should keep closing pages until they find the one that don't have share buttons. Then, memorize a list of "safe sites?"
For this I suggest dynamic filtering[1], as this guarantees there will be no connection to sites with block rules, and block rules can be easily locally overridden in case it is needed for a specific site.
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-to...
When you access a website with facebook tracking installed, you are consenting to being tracked.
Bury it in long legalese isn't accepted either.
You have not understood what this outrage is about. Trump's campaign didn't use data from the Equifax breach to win the election, so it doesn't matter.
No, it also doesn't matter that Obama did the same and boasted about it. He is a visionary, Trump is a baddie.
Do you get it? Trump baddie, all other politicians, unless Republicans, goodies.
If I had known that Trump winning would be enough to get some of my friends off Facebook, I would have urged all my American friends to vote for him!
Oh, well.
A lot of harm can be done in one generation. Don't you think the history shows us that?
Look at Microsoft. Windows’ golden period lasted from 1998 until 2006 with the release of Vista. With the release of Vista, Microsoft’s strangle hold on relevance disintegrated in a summer. And now what? Microsoft technically “exists” but who cares?
We are witnessing Facebook’s Vista moment right now. Donald Trump is Facebook’s Windows Vista.
Think about that for a second.
Modern marketing has ensured that everyone in the US born after the'80s has grown up in an environment of marketing saturation, but modern marketing/propaganda was invented in the early 20th century. (Thanks, Edward Bernays) It changed our lives and the way we think, from Fascist propaganda to Coldwar rhetoric, and to the belief that orange juice is a breakfast drink and the engagement ring is a thing.
FB is one of thousands of powerful entities continuing the tradition, but of course, data mining has reached obscene levels, but FB is only one of many players.
We’ll emerge from this a little wiser, and maybe with some new regulations. Whether regulation is good or bad I can’t say, but this is all very much a learning process as a society and, to some potentially great extent, as an industry.
Frankly, I think crossing this line was necessary.
assuming what you said is true, should we allow the next FB a generation of leeway too? A generation here and a generation there...
I agree: I don't have the same concerns with Facebook as with, say, a monopoly ISP.
That said, in both cases I think there's an opportunity to define customer data as containing a responsibility and liability, so that collecting it is a double-edged activity and there are potential repercussions causing companies to guard its dispersal with more care.
The followup question would be: how can that be broken up?
I'm for regulation, if you can come up with sensible ones. But targeting a specific company to be split up doesn't seem like it actually solved the problem in the long run. I mean look what happened with AT&T -- we're almost back to complete consolidation again.
Not really. If Facebook can answer "we're sorry, we'll change and fix it" to every problem, why can't a regulatory regime do the same? E.g. "We're sorry we allowed this acquisition to go through, but it turned out to actually be anticompetitive and our prior mistake doesn't change that..."
> I mean look what happened with AT&T -- we're almost back to complete consolidation again.
The unfortunate thing with AT&T is the regulators, over time and political changes, weren't consistent. I don't think we really want a politically lowest-common-denominator regulatory regime, but that's what we have.
One could split Facebook into a "connecting the whole world" company that Zuck talks about constantly and the ad company FB actually is.
The ad company would have exclusive license to fill of all the ad slots on the platform, and the social company would request ads through some kind of interface which had strict privacy controls. The ad company would take a cut and pass the rest of the cash to social network.
Just one way I think it could splitting the company could work.
Perhaps Facebook could be thought of as a monopoly because 1) it has no clear, direct competitors, and 2) it's taken action to buy up anything that could become one [1]?
[1] successfully with Instagram and WhatsApp, and attempted with SnapChat
> The followup question would be: how can that be broken up?
It could be divested of Instagram and WhatsApp, for starters. I think its core facebook.com could also be split up in a way to increase competition further: randomly divide its users between multiple successor networks with a mandate to provide an open API for inter-operation.
Maybe so, but Facebook has shown a willingness to spend the money to acquire control of those evolving trends to maintain its dominance (see: Instagram, Whatsapp, and the failed attempt to buy Snapchat).
At a minimum I think it should be divested of Instagram and WhatsApp.
There's no irony here, just the fact that the author doesn't manage or control the website team that put the trackers there.
To be fair, I shared your attitude in my 20's. My mother would snail mail a yearly newsletter with printed pictures and I yawned at the effort.
You speak as if you have no agency in the situation. But, you do have agency. Using, or not using, facebook is 100%, entirely your choice. There was a happy (happier?) world before 2005, where families shared photos and stayed in touch, without Mark Zuckerberg.
But it is just so naive to assume I wouldn't miss out on notable pictures and news of people I love by opting out. Facebook does have some value. We're not just purely idiots. We get the trade-off. Hard opting out would have real downsides for me.
It took time but everybody is happy now : )
I still sometimes miss the family blig we used to have but updates are more frequent and the threshold for contributing is lower than it used to be.
Surely the breakup of Bell is better than if they were allowed to continue as a monopoly right?
Monopolies aren't inherently bad - especially not ones like Bell, where they're beneficial to everyone.
Any citations for this? The rise of MCI cut my phone bills by more than half in the 80's. Bell was killing us with 3 figure/month residential phone bills. And, I pay 10x less now per month in non inflation adjusted dollars than I did in 1986.
Out of state calls back then were commonly double digit cents per minute. Now they are typically 1 cent per minute or even less.
They did all sorts of creative accounting to make it look like the breakup was a big success that led to lower profits, when in reality cutting bloated bureaucracy and the R&D budget led to really bumper profits.
Maybe others paid more than before, but enjoyed the additional minutes.
Prices for long-distance calls fell.
That is an interesting thought. What other examples are there for monopolies being inherently good for everyone?
Standard Oil did (minus the environment); under their monopoly prices were incredibly cheap. The person who benefited most from the split was Rockefeller, who you've probably heard of.
Few would have predicted the dominance of Facebook back in 2004. And few will predict the next big thing that will break Facebook's dominance.
All this talk about the government breaking up Facebook is likely just as short-sighted as the talk about the government breaking up Microsoft in the 90s.
> They have done that voluntarily for years. It's under your settings.
Only kinda sorta. I exported my data and the photos were clearly lower-res versions from the ones that are currently live on my profile. Also I doubt the export contains all the data they have linked to you, as I bet they have far more from their tracking, analytics, and shadow profiles that they won't export.
No they haven't.
Take the case of Paul-Olivier Dehaye. In December 2016 Mr Dehaye, a Belgian mathematician, e-mailed Facebook asking for a copy of the data it had gathered about him through an advertising tool called Pixel.
Organisations based in the EU or which process data of EU residents are required to answer questions like this, known as subject-access requests.
Yet it took 106 days for Facebook to do so. The firm acknowledged the existence of Mr Dehaye’s Pixel data, but declined to provide them, stating that doing so would involve “disproportionate effort”.
The data were buried too deep inside Facebook’s data-analytics warehouse, known as Hive. When Mr Dehaye appealed to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), which regulates Facebook’s data processing in Europe, he entered a similar maze of e-mails. The DPC is still assessing the case.
https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21739997-europeans-ask...
Profit and number of users are not good metrics for the future of a platform. Facebook the company probably isn't going to die, but Facebook the platform can and will inevitably become a ghost town in short order, just as all its predecessors.
Remember, Facebook is a parent company to other revenue sources. The company will continue to survive. Then again, the same can technically be said of Myspace.
Facebook's user growth in North America is in decline.
https://techcrunch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/techcrunch.com...
Being someone who works for a media company, we've already seen a significant drop in Facebook followers since the Cambridge Analytica fiasco.
No, I don't think Facebook the social media platform has a bright future. The fact that Gen Z isn't using Facebook is a sign that Facebook has entered the initial stages of apoptosis.
https://amp-businessinsider-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.b...
I can't say I blame Gen Z. Why would any young person want to use Facebook at this point when it's highly censored and your mom and grandma are peering at every post you make or like?
The government can only prevent acquisitions and mergers, when such would greatly harm the consumer by giving a company too much control of a vital market, like health insurance or phone service. Moreover, it didn't stop banks from consolidating 30 separate entities into 5 between 1990 and 2005 or so.
On top of that, there was very move of youngsters to WhatsApp and Instagram as their social media of choice. Instead of lame old man's Facebook. That's very clear competition for new users.
YT with today's reach: no buyout from Google. Simple as that