With trust destroyed, Facebook is haunted by old data deals
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(1) On every meetup I attend people are genuinely extremely surprised when I share with them even 1-2 of the screwups Facebook did. They are ENTIRELY clueless. And we're talking tech-savvy business founders and CEOs -- and often times CTOs and CFOs.
(2) Most don't care. They write it off as "I am not important enough to be spied on" or just directly admit "Facebook is integrated too much in my life and work and I can't replace it" and that's the end of the discussion. Many even say "they have only a part of my data, they can't have it all, right?" -- and have no idea about how well the tracking industry does cross-referencing of seemingly unrelated data sets.
I don't think Facebook is going away anytime soon in any measurable way or form. Sure they might struggle monetizing their mountain of data and analytics, and sure the stock market circus might not be on their side right now but I can't see them actually losing a significant chunk of users in the next 5 years.
But I'd argue Uber is largely replaceable -- you still have public transport and taxis while Facebook has no alternative and most people are too inert to even think of replacing it...
We can all see how the media grows bolder and reports quite negatively on Facebook but I wonder if that even makes any difference.
At https://Qbix.com we have spent our own money on a free open source alternative platform to Facebook.
I think we’re still pretty bad at marketing it. Would appreciate some feedback if you check out the site and watch the video.
It’s far far ahead of Mastodon, Solid, OwnCloud or whatever else is out there. It has full documentation (https://qbix.com/platform and https://qbix.com/platform/guide and https://qbix.com/platform/tutorials) and can be tried out of the box. It has been audited by third party security firms and come out with flying colors.
Here is a laundry list of features: https://qbix.com/features.pdf
But it needs a huge effort to make it as nice and appealing as say stripe.com is for payment integrations. Those guys are amazing.
We recently released version 1.1 on github. We have chatrooms, galleries, events, trips, back end and front end components which all work together like BSD systems all work together. Just slap them on pages, theme it and there u have your own social network. It took us years and nearly $1M in funding. But you can’t see much of that at a glance, or play around with it, yet. That should change in 2019.
PHP? I'll pass.
Don't bother with any arguments that PHP powers huge sites including Facebook and Wordpress. The whole point of this thread, and presumably Qbit's very existence, is that they are not good role models.
If you are trying to be a modern, secure, respectful replacement for Facebook, be modern, secure, and respectful.
Finally, about being modern and chasing trends. Wordpress is not modern but it powers 1 in every 3 websites. Ghost is modern and is used on 0.1% of websites. Thanks but we’ll pass.
I am not even sure how PHP is disrespectful, so I’ll leave that one alone.
If it makes you feel better, we are also working on an app hosting the whole network from a random computer or a mobile phone on a local network.
[1] https://serverfault.com/questions/922074/list-of-most-popula...
PHP has a lot of very well documented problems.
Also, do you have a source when claiming that most PHP installations use more modern versions? I seriously doubt that particular claim is true. Most business people think of IT as a one-time expense. You can still find a ton of 5.0 - 5.3 installations out there. Hell, in my country there are good amount of PHP 4.x websites as well.
Sure it does—Instagram.
You switch FB for FB, basically. :)
Right now, yes.
I’m responding to your “most people are too inert to even think of replacing [Facebook]” comment. My point is, they already have. That presents an easy regulatory solution to Mark Zuckerberg. Break up Facebook.
Facebook has changed from that useful platform it once was to basically nonstop custom-tailored commercials, but the alternatives that it sought to replace have not and never will. Want to keep in touch with your relatives or friends? Directly engage people again. This can be as simple as an email thread, group text messaging, or an application like GroupMe. Need to plan events with your group? Throw it on a google calendar, who cares about who said they are going or who left your invite on read? Contacts? Your phone and address book on your computer. Keep your photos on something nonproprietary and therefore future proof; contrary to popular belief, no one will remember all the likes your pictures from Cabo got you in two weeks anyway.
Your engagement might be low -- mine is almost zero -- but you are still a source of data even if a reduced one. I am not sure even disabling Javascript altogether will help; I am pretty sure they fall back to techniques like your IP history, known devices from which you logged in and few other such techniques.
My gut feeling is they are holding on very tight to their personally identifiable information harvesting practice and won't let go of it anytime soon. Hope I am wrong.
[0] https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/201...
To me, the story reads a lot like a media narrative that has very little to do with users’s actual lives. And I’ve been reading variations on “Why Facebook sucks” and “Why Facebook is doomed” for a very long time. It’s like the “Why this is the year of Linux on the desktop,” but for media companies.
Does anyone else remember reading on Slashdot about how Microsoft is evil and any day now, we're going to move to Linux and revolt? Except that normal people didn't care and didn't notice?
This will not change overnight. Or even after several years. If Facebook fades into irrelevance it will likely be a death by a million paper cuts and not after a short-lived revolution.
What's IE's market share today vs 10 years ago?
How many Windows Phones are in people's pockets?
How many people opened Hotmail/Live accounts in the last year?
People do care, it just takes a long time to see the effects play out.
Such a familiar phrase. I'm so tired of hearing it from people I know. This is exactly like saying "I'm too broke for anyone to steal my credit card".
What you think of your own importance has zero bearing on how some unknown third party perceives you. Neither can you predict how they will use your information or how it will affect you. It's insane that people spend time and energy on keeping secrets from their relatives and friends (which everyone does) and yet can't see that a third party that actively seeks your information is more likely to cause you harm than people you know. This is a trivial deduction, yet so many people can't comprehend it. They think that because they can't imagine how someone else could screw them up using their personal info, no one could possibly screw them up using their personal info.
Apparently, I'm not eloquent enough to convey this in a verbal conversation. I've tried. Funny thought: maybe I should print the paragraph above on a card and hand it out when someone says the key phrase.
I noticed that Americans and part of Europeans (mostly Germans I believe but probably others as well) perceive leaks of personally identifiable information as outrageous but everybody I know here in Eastern Europe are indifferent. Unless they lose money or their company gets a negative PR, they could not care less.
I know the primary issue is that the SSN wasn't intended for the use case it is used in, but we're at the point now that it is so probably best to protect it in a manner that protects the user/owner.
Fellow Eastern European here, I remember I was made fun of by my former colleagues back in 2005-2006 when I was saying that the United States requiring bio data in order to get a traveling visa (I think fingerprints became mandatory for US visa applicants back around that time) was very not ok, I received the same responses that you mention.
Nowadays that the bio thing has started reaching and directly affecting people more to the West the subject is fortunately debated on websites like this one and also in some parts of the Western mainstream media, but back in EE the subject is still ignored or at best is made fun of. I remember attending a street march/protest against bio ID cards/passports a couple of years ago, and the majority of participants were religious people that believed things like "666 the number of the Devil" and all that + a couple of tech people like myself which are still seen as paranoid by our friends and work colleagues. Unfortunately the civil society from this part of the world is totally mute on this type of subjects.
But most people in EE are also way too cynical and demeaning by default and yeah, that's a real problem when issues like these arise. Nobody takes them seriously until something monumental happens.
I think this deduction is actually wrong. Ask yourself why you hide some things from your relatives and friends. Could it be because quite a lot of people are really bigoted, and the immediate social costs of them learning more about you would be dire? Whereas data collection currently has only one visible consequence on the individual level: what kind of ads & spam you get, and how much. People correctly recognize this as mostly harmless.
People do react to things that affect them directly. In my country it is widely known that people trying to cheat our IRS or social insurance got busted over Facebook photos, so they know not to present a lifestyle that's different than the one they report to the government. (E.g. if you're consistently reporting low income, don't post photos of your two limos. If you're on a (paid by social insurance) medical leave that restricts you to bed, you'd better not get tagged on a photo placing you in a restaurant.)
EDIT: I don't mean to imply that the government has a backdoor access to this data; it's just there were cases of people dumb enough to share incriminating evidence of fraud that found its way to government investigators, by e.g. being posted publicly.
There are definitely some parallels here to the way people now often friend their bosses on Facebook, leading to uncomfortable knowledge sharing.
Net Neutrality in the US was obviously gamed in favour of ISPs, telecoms and large corporations, and the population didn't lift a finger behind posting sanctimoniously on Reddit/HN, and arguing with each other about the semantics of free/un-free markets.
The key words are "visible" and "currently". There are less visible consequences like identity theft, scams and all kinds of sneaky profiling that affect you without your knowledge. And no one really knows how this data will be used in the future.
"If he's this good at making people love him, why didn't he do it before? Because these fools always look up for power. People above you, they never want to share power with you. Why you look to them? People below you, you give them hope, you give them respect, they give you power, 'cause they don't think they have any, so they don't mind giving it up."
Says who? That's not deduction at all. As an example, if you get broken into its far more likely it was someone you know than completely random.
You're more likely to get murdered by your spouse than by a stranger. Your kid is more likely to get kidnapped by its parent than a stranger. Statistically speaking, it's the people who fear the unknown bogeyman who are irrational, not those who fear their friend, relative or neighbour.
1) Issues resulting from privacy loss mostly have nothing to do with murder and kidnapping statistics. Far more relevant would be the note that as of 2019 identity theft affected 23% of all US internet users [1]. And that's just one way to misuse your information. There are countless others.
2) Loss of privacy means loss of control over who interacts with your data and when that happens. I don't understand why this simple fact is so hard to grasp.
If your information ends up on sale or in a public data dump, anyone who wants to misuse it will have an opportunity to do so, probably forever. It's up to them to decide whether your info is "worth it" or how to use it.
Something you consider trivial today can be used in an elaborate scam tomorrow. Or it could be used for a social media stink campaign by your unhappy ex. Or something else.
The point is, "I am not important enough to be spied on" is a stupid statement, because whether you are important is determined by context. When you loose your privacy, you lose control over that context.
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[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/763130/internet-identity...
But looking at it another way, the sheer volume of incidents has got to some how desensitize the vast majority of people out there. Personally, probably half of the companies that I regularly do business with have had some major data breach within the last few years. But nothing ever comes of it - no real punishment, no new meaningful requirements to protect their infrastructure, and no specific harm to me personally. So should I stop interacting with these companies? What about all the other companies out there where it’s just a matter of time before their own data breach? Should I eschew all technology and go back to the barter system? I think the genie has already been let out of the bottle and maybe we need to look at solutions assuming that data breaches will happen and how to protect people after the fact rather than preventing them in the first place.
That made me nostalgic for 2013, which at the time felt like a bad year. I wonder how I'll feel about 2018 in 2023.
(Context: "I'm not important enough" was the standard rebuke to Snowden's leaks)
He replied that when he was starting out, he was small fry, so he didn't face anything beyond what he would as an average, non-comedian African American. In the comedy circuit, he was mostly ignored, but not explicitly discriminated against.
Once he reached a certain popularity level, and he was in the running for spots on talk shows, SNL, TV episodes, he started to notice it. The stakes are a lot higher, and there are lots of people coveting those TV appearances. So suddenly, people who would otherwise never even notice him, were acting in ways to specifically exclude him from the running in areas that were traditionally reserved for white comedians.
Just because you aren't important enough to be spied on today doesn't mean that you won't appear on someone's threat radar later.
1) Politically. While most users don't care enough to stop using the service, users in the US and Western Europe care enough that politicians who stand up to FB get praise and potentially votes. Looking tough on tech is now a quick political win and that will eventually hurt them, most likely in the EU.
2) Talent wars. HN might not a good proxy for the general population but it's reasonable proxy for people FB wants to hire and the general sentiment around here seems to be I don't want to work for FB anymore. IRL most of my engineering friends don't want to work for FB either.
I fear that (1) might turn into a witch hunt -- "all tech is bad". Mass population is not very good at distinguishing nuance, especially when charismatic politicians tell them what to think. But I guess in this case this will work to Facebook's detriment.
As for (2), I haven't thought of that because I don't live in the USA and lack the perspective. Thanks for providing it! I think this might actually hurt FB a lot.
It's already happening. See last month's New York Times story "‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ So Say Some Computer Science Students." [1]
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/technology/jobs-facebook-...
They then get 6-figure offers, and shit, have to pay those student loans somehow.
Facebook goes to the best schools in the country and hires the best of the best.
I don't think they will lose users progressively. Nothing will happen until something does, and then everyone will leave en masse (or simply stop logging in, without deactivating their account).
We should just work to make that happen as soon as possible.
True - but I still think there's a big difference between understanding that your info isn't private and not being bothered versus assuming that your info IS private. The real question is your #1: Is the group of people with this understanding growing by any significant margin?
“Then surely you wouldn’t mind sharing your fb password with me, with your spouse and your manager at work. Moreso, we would like to have access to all your messaging activity in real time.”
I do worry that FB/google etc could use that type of stuff as blackmail to get the policies they want enacted though.
The question is whether the standards for personal conduct have been permanently lowered for future candidates or whether that was a one time thing.
We have all said things, made crude and even cruel jokes, that we'd be embarrassed about if they became public. But I think we are starting to understand that it's pretty common and with cameras everywhere and social media it's much more likely that you'll be "outed" for something you said or did or would rather keep private.
I don't know if a society that doesn't shame people for that sort of stuff will be better. Shame is a powerful way that societies regulate undesired behavior. But I do think it's happening.
I doubt that will ever be the case.
Trump got elected despite having his past (or because of?). People with visible tattoos are CEOs. Elon smoked weed on camera. You think that shit would have flown in the 1940s?
Wow, really? Where on Earth do you find this kind of hope? I want some!
I know HN can be a bit of a fun free zone, but I do genuinely hope you didn't actually take the above 100% seriously?
They’ll be “so relatable” at that point
People might actually listen to a candidates’ policies
I went on a usage embargo for quite a while before deleting my account. Most of my friends’ event planning is done through FB so it’s hard to get invited to stuff if you arent a user.
After the Instagram plaintext password thing I decided it was time to go.
I made a post on FB stating why I was deleting my account and that I was keeping it up for another week for time for friends to read the post.
I outlined a lot of the things FB has done or let happen. The responses were the typical trite FB shit.
1. What even is privacy, man‽
2. Tin foil hat problems
3. My account is fine
4. I am 12 and what is this
The idea that Facebook's "Russian meme/adverts" situation had anything to do with Trump winning is laughable beyond any reasonable measure. He won because Clinton was perhaps the worst candidate in the history of US Presidential elections, not because some Russian trolls wrote some silly crap on FB.
But I agree with your premise...FB is just being used as a big fat scapegoat so the real culprits that engineered Clinton's loss don't lose their cushy political positions.
> He won because Clinton was perhaps the worst candidate in the history of US Presidential elections, not because some Russian trolls wrote some silly crap on FB.
Both of these things are true. Nothing about Clinton's weakness excuses Facebook's shameful and evasive behavior when it was discovered that they were ground-zero for a foreign propaganda campaign.
You're point though is true. The $10-200k that russia supposedly spent and the surrounding meme/fake news bubble that expanded around it simply didn't have the influence that people keep claiming it did.
This is the most hyperbolic, hand-wavy, and incorrect take. Guess that propaganda worked on you?
I voted for Trump, have never been an FB user, and have trashed FB for close to 10 years on this very site.
So I doubt[1] that there's an organized campaign against them of the sort they launched against Soros. But much like, if you punch a cop, you have to expect it won't end well, destroying a bunch of news rooms isn't going to endear you to the journalists picking up the pieces.
[1] Could be wrong.
I mean I suspect the same thing, but I wish everyone would be upfront with their motives instead of acting like they're just concerned citizens. Facebook's biggest critics are the same people that hated Facebook before they did any of this.
No one has paid me or offered to pay me to do so.
They've brought every ounce of this pressure on themselves by shirking their responsibility as a corporate citizen.
They're under no obligation to. Firms don't (and shouldn't) make personal decisions based on the whims of the mob.
> They still refuse to fully cooperate on various investigations involving foreign interference, and have shown practically no remorse for their negligence in these cases.
How many times does a company need to say sorry? I mean honestly, who would have thought a foreign government would do such a thing?
Plus the foreign interference is overblown. The amount of ads and groups Russia was pushing was miniscule compared to amount of content pushed everyday and political advertising that political parties does.
Of course not. Yet.
> How many times does a company need to say sorry
I don't care about 'sorry'. I'm not even sure what it means for a corporation to 'say sorry'.
I know what it means for humans to apologize for something serious. That involves taking responsibility for the bad act, being willing to honestly, candidly and forthrightly discuss the problem in question, take concrete steps to attempt to remedy the injury, and demonstrate how one is trying to make sure it doesn't happen again.
So when called out, FB management reflected upon their actions and came to the decision that facing up to it like adults is the best policy: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/14/facebook-...
> Plus the foreign interference is overblown
So FB can prove that. They can show a trustworthy third party[1] evidence that what is currently publicly known about that situation (which is not their only scandal by a long shot) is the full extent of what happened, what they're doing about it, and state in a non-weaselly way that they understand the importance that we don't find out later they're lying again. Sunshine and some time is a magic combination.
But of course, nobody's under an _obligation_ to attempt to regain trust. And given that nobody really expects current management to willingly give up power, I predict that they won't attempt it, because they've shown no material change to their overall behavior at all so far - in fact, they keep doubling down on sneaky, nasty and dishonest to try to keep pushing forward with their plans.
So I predict that they'll keep trying to obfuscate their way through the news-cycle, only later for it to be shown that whatever it is this time, it was worse, and in ways nobody even previously considered. Until they blow something else sufficiently important up that 'the mob' (AKA the rest of the folks on this planet who are sick of jerks blowing important things up, AKA FB's feedstock) decide that's gotta stop.
I also predict it won't be 'the mob' with torches and pitchforks. It'll be the one with Bloomberg terminals.
[1] Given that they have serially obfuscated, to outright lied, to hired firms to spread antisemitic smears against critics, nobody in their right mind would trust anything self-interested said by Zuckerberg or Sandberg.
It's probably some old giants of media behind the attack, but I wouldn't be too surprised if FB is relishing in the controversy. It throttles their growth for a bit, but they won't seem like such a Goliath to regulators. They can make some compromises ("We won't let foreign IP Addresses post politically-motivated advertisements"); divert attention away from the data mining; and make one big, symbolic gesture in an emergency ("Mark Zuckerberg will step down as CEO... but will keep boardroom seat and serve in figurative role")
Agent 1) Publishes salacious article
Agent 2) Sees traffic sharing that article, publishes its own
Agent 3) Traffic is starting to die down, publishes even MORE salacious article by uncharitably interpreting everything.
Crowd) Wow there are a lot of articles about this, it must be a big deal!
Agents 1-3) Facebook story is a big deal that we need to cover!
All other agents) Let's try and blow the lid off this facebook thing!
Assumptions:
1) Facebook's news feed algorithm is optimized to find viral stories and maximize engagement with them. During the 2016 election, Donald Trump exploited this behavior repeatedly with his many successful PR stunts.
The way it worked was: Trump would make a rude comment, and then everyone offended by it would share the story in outrage. Perhaps 90% of their FB friends would agree, but the other 10% saw the rude comment as telling truth to power. The messages were crafted to maximize this bifurcation.
2) There were efforts by Russia sponsored groups to fund various social media campaigns, both for and against Trump, and for and against various non-mainstream political causes.
Analysis:
Here's where it relates to your observation: Officials realize that #1 above can have real political consequences in the US, and thus view it as a threat to the status quo (which it is).
Facebook did not intend to let itself be used this way by Trump, it just happens to be the profit maximizing evolution of the news feed algorithm after many years of R&D.
Officials suddenly realize both the threat that the news feed poses, and also the opportunity it offers. To make the point clear, Facebook can in essence be a softer version of a Great Firewall, combined with a built-in social credit system, not just for the US but for the world.
Facebook made clear its stance on working more closely with US officials when it announced that under $150K had been spent by Russian-funded interest groups in the 2016 election, but that was not enough to satisfy officials.
As the pressure on Facebook slowly ratcheted up, Facebook announced human reviewers for controversial content, new content guidelines, the eviction of various alt political personalities, etc. This too was not enough to satisfy US officials, who remained concerned about weaponization of the platform and who didn't like Facebook's attitude.
So pressure continued to increase, as evidenced by the PR released by FB which attempted to put Sandberg in the spotlight for missteps. This is a common tactic, akin to Rumsfeld being in the spotlight about torture to shield GWB from scrutiny.
We can see now that scapegoating Sandberg didn't work, though it did buy a bit of time for Facebook to formulate its strategy and hunker down.
So now US officials are spreading the news about various privacy breaches in an attempt to spook investors and force Zuck to come to the table and allow the Great Firewall + Social Credit system that officials want, which will guarantee that no upstart candidate could ever leverage the news feed algorithm to get billions in free marketing budget ever again.
As others point out in this thread, Zuck controls a lot of Facebook and is unlikely to be fired.
I personally expect that Zuck fully intends to play ball but is dealing with employees who (like those at Google who scuttled the big China search deal) are not so ethically adept as to convince themselves that handing the keys to US officials is appropriate. My guess is that FB has such solid internal analytics that it would be impossible to hide such cooperation from the many employees who are laser focused on various metrics and KPIs of the algorithm and its associated revenue streams.
So what is happening is a sort of dance during which both players are watching to see how public opinion evolves before they make their next move. US officials probably have a few fairly impressive cards they have not played yet, and would probably strongly prefer not to play them. I'd also guess that there are efforts underway inside Facebook to create the mechanisms US officials want in a way that may take a bit more time but will not spook the workers.
There may also be a plan to have some innocuous-seeming laws passed such that compliance will give FB the excuse to gut/rebuild various aspects of its algorithm's analytics which allow it to embed the firewall + social credit monitoring hooks without alarming those working on them.
At this point I think the dominant factors are the reality that Zuck does plan to fully cooperate and that there is an unexpected level of urgency from US official to make this happen sooner rather than later. I suppose if you add up the userbase of FB, Instagram and Whatsapp it's clear why the officials are chomping at the bit to get the analytic and censorship dashboards up and running ASAP.
"Murdoch hosted Zuckerberg at his Sun Valley, Idaho, villa and expressed discontent with Facebook's News Feed algorithm and its handling of news.
He requested Facebook consult publishing partners and be more generous sharing digital ad revenue, or he vowed, News Corp executives would take their dislike of Facebook public. He also hinted that News Corp lobbyists would take a more aggressive stand against Facebook with U.S. regulators, as the company had done against Google in Europe."
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/12/facebook-rupert-murdoch-thre...
Can any lawyers or investors comment on what it would take for Mark to lose his job as CEO? How much value has to be shaved off facebook shares before investors loss all confidence ?
If you take a lot of money from rich people you're never gonna be above their power.
~58% (Zuckerberg's share percentage) can't be ousted no matter how the other voting shares vote.
Zuckerberg has 58.3% of Facebooks voting rights.
He's not going anywhere.
Zuck isn't the problem, the whole fucking service is the problem.
It is still shocking to me that people EVER trusted Facebook. Since the very beginning, Mark has always been openly dismissive of user privacy.
These hit-pieces are getting very tired and don't really do anything but put scary spins on things that have been public info for years. It's a shame a once-respected news org like the NYT has to resort to scrounging around looking for anything, anything that will make for a FUD story about Facebook to get some page views. Problem is that they suffer no penalty as people seem happy to take the headline and run with it and the subtleties of the situation which Facebook itself has discussed in many instances including this one are discounted. Stories about "well it's not that bad" don't sell as well as "OMG HOLY SH*T FACEBOOK HAS BEEN GIVING YOUR MESSAGES TO EVERYONE!!!" and getting clicks is all these orgs care about now because it's all they can do to stay afloat.
How can you trust a man and his company with your private data when he himself is so private about his life?
Don't get me wrong, I still admire Facebook's R&D but that's pretty much it.
People here might care, it might make good headlines, but I don't think any normal people out there care. When I talk to my friends who are not in Tech they just assume FB knows everything about them.. and they don't give a shit as they just want to use it for free.
I some T.V. show last night with Media people decrying Facebook and then Facebook explaining how they were trying their best and helping the world communicate.
Both sides seemed so overwhelming full of themselves. They both clearly thought all of their customers were idiots. And neither had the dignity to come out and say that they though all of their customers were idiots.
This is all going to end with another set of idiots in government passing a bunch of laws that in 10 years half the country will say were a giant mistake and the other half will say "but imagine how much worse things would be if we didn't have these idiotic laws."
Ugh.
Ironically, that's exactly where they should be doing it.
On their next earnings call, if they say DAU grew by 5%, how would you audit the veracity of that statement? Users aren't cash, which can at least be verified by auditors that review bank statements.
Think about whole new generation of politicians and government. What if many of them said or did something wrong when they were young? Will our society adapt itself to new moral norms or will they be managed by some masters of the puppets?
TechCrunch is sure carrying a lot of water for FB here.
This stuff ruins lives. “Dumb fucks”
Burn them to the ground. Or, more likely, have the cia silently partner up
It’s highly likely that data has been for sale behind the scenes, readily available for malicious actors, making players like Facebook complicit in ugly shenanigans.
Please understand the downsides of information technology. It can be abused to hurt others in ways you may not have foreseen. I’m unable to withstand being harassed any further, and the harassment is 100% enabled by infotech. The Facebook shenanigans will hopefully serve as a prime example of the dangers of free information sharing by malicious actors.
I would say it's a near certainty. Not saying that Facebook the company was selling data under the table, but one corrupt or extorted sysadmin in the right place is all it would take.
I mean most of these deals happened 5+ years ago. And FB's stock is paying the price for it now.
So message to employees:
There are employee's who have received their entire 4 year grant fully vested now who weren't around when any of this happened. What your employer does, even if its not related to you, even if you weren't around for it, can still bite you in the ass.
They are paying the price in terms of the lowered share price and may have had nothing to do with any of this.
As another example banks are still paying fines related to 2008 that affect the current year's bonus pool.
The thing that bothers me the most about this is that rank and file Facebook employees wrote code to allow all of these companies access to users chat messages, personal data, etc. and they never said no.