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Comment by sftwds | Hacker News Reader

I... I... I just can’t even...

What is Facebook thinking?? Shouldn’t a company which is already getting bad PR for its handling of private data be extra careful about how much personal data it gathers and what it does with it?

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The funny part is you always have those people that show up and say that we are "too hard" on Facebook, and that the NYTimes is just pushing too much and that it's just bad PR, not really bad actions. And yet, after all this bad PR, Facebook keeps being a shitty company.

Sort-of.

I mean Facebook does deserve the negative PR it's receiving, don't get me wrong. I finally deleted my account, too, since it's become too much. It does seem to me like it's very much in their interest of the media to keep attacking Facebook now that it's socially acceptable (Cambridge Analytica stuff and all), since Facebook's one of the companies that greatly influenced and interfered with their possibility to generate an income.

I'm emphatically not defending them here, but it may make sense from their perspective. They live and die by ad targeting and maintaining their monopoly power over social networks, both which requires large amounts of personal data. Knowing what apps teenagers have installed and how often those apps are used is instrumental in detecting an up and coming social media rival.

Further, their only major competitor in the ads space is Google, which has access to this information via Android and its control over the Play Store.

Plus, what are the teenagers going to do about it? Facebook also owns Instagram. I guess they could use Snapchat...

Yeah it makes sense, but the problem for their shareholders is their business model will constantly turn them into a huge boogeyman and they'll never recover goodwill that keeps their users stuck to the platform when competitors appear. Mass user migrations happen, and they can happen VERY fast. Wait until a whole country goes off of Facebook.

Why should Zuckerberg care? You know on the plane ride home from his visit to Congress, he was laughing about the old people who are so out of date they just don't get it. You know he was... He got a finger-waggin' from people he doesn't respect. He's not going to change.

why would they? they have never faced any real consequences for doing this and it's insanely profitable.

I think the problem is that this is what Facebook IS.

As an organization they don't have another way to operate / seem incapable of doing anything else other than this scummy stuff.

They can't stop being what they are or they'd die so they just double down and double down.

Generation Z and even some millennials are starting to ditch Facebook. The company is desperate to know what the kids are into now. This is what growth-at-all-costs gets you.

Facebook is like Trump - they go with what works and double-down as needed. Questions are a distraction.

What will get them to stop is likely regulatory oversight.

When you have enough personal data to blackmail anyone who disagrees, you can go pretty damn far.

Eventually they'll encounter a hero, someone important enough who says "fuck it"

Its just speculation, that they're blackmailing anyone to make things happen, but anyone can see the incentive is there. Hard to imagine blackmail isn't just waiting to happen with that kinda data.

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