The Onion Declares War on Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook

It's purely about who journalists and other writers see as friends vs. enemies. Nothing at all to do with actual privacy. People who hope to make money from their own websites see Google as neutral or even beneficial, helping them get more clicks and more ad dollars. They see Facebook as stealing those clicks, as the content is read on Facebook itself. This is clear from the very first example in the OP: "We Don’t Make Any Money If You Don’t Click The <censored by HN> Link"

I'm not saying who's correct or incorrect, right or wrong, just that the belief exists and drives behavior. Even if there's no deliberate ill intent, there's a natural tendency for people to be more hyper-aware of their perceived enemies' failings than of others'. Always consider self-interest when seeing what other websites publish about the big tech companies, or I guess about anything else either.

Google and Facebook both have privacy issues, but Facebook seems to have some negative impacts that google doesn’t. It’s addictive; it encourages shallow social engagement; it contributes to political polarization and the spread of disinformation, and so on. I’m not saying that those charges are right, but while the people at HN are possibly most concerned about the privacy issue the average Facebook hater has a lot of other issues with them.

And a person who hates Facebook for non-privacy reasons is likely to give them a harder time about privacy too. They may not be rational, but I think it’s pretty normal human behavior.

I don't get it either. I guess people like to have a single villain. Facebook is bad but there are so many other companies that play fast and loose with data (Equifax for example). I hope there will be more legislation like GDPR instead of going after specific companies.

It's a fair bit easier to switch away from Google, as most of their services have much weaker network effects. For example searching, I can only resort to Google if everything else fails, and easily switch back and forth. (This is not to say that there aren't still tracking issues.)

With Facebook, there is no alternative. If you want the value that the network provides you are trapped.

Facebook has much more data on you and the data is a lot more private. What is the most private data google has? Gmail? Locations? AFAIK fb has access to a lot of people’s gmail accounts.

If the comments even here are an indication, it’s because people have absolutely zero level of understanding into the level of data Google produces and has access to on you.

Zuckerberg has much higher face & name recognition

I think it's simply that it's obvious to people that Facebook has a lot of data about them. Most of the general public does not think about things like search history, ad targeting, click tracking, etc.

Of course Facebook does those things too, but most people appear to be outraged that things they shared with Facebook ended up being more public than they expected, and were shared with an organization that might have helped elect Trump. Most people probably still don't realize the click tracking and stuff like that is going on.

They're probably using JavaScript to submit that to the server. Although it's technically not necessary, it's completely believable that they would use JS for that.

Archived copy:

https://archive.is/veTbZ