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Comment by expertentipp | Hacker News Reader

Domestic data hoarders and advertisers - extremely invasive and territorial. The difference is that none of them runs social networking website or mobile messenger app, thus without consumer facing facade many uninformed assume they don't exist. e.g. their media and retail oligopolies like to roll out their own ad, tracking, and loyalty programs to have full control of the data. They don't let anyone in and are trying to expand, clumsily, to other EU countries.

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What does "other data collectors exist" have to do with Facebook's status as the dominating social network (95% (measuring DAUs)/80% (measuring MAUs) market share according to the press release)? Facebook also clearly cites other social media companies/networks from a wider scope in defense, not data collectors.

there are other relevant collectors as well for example Deutsche Post (German Postal Services), see https://www.dw.com/en/deutsche-post-sold-voter-microtargetin...

It seems by "competition", they don't mean a competing social network, they mean competition for advertising pesos.

Think of FB as an oil company, whose product is human attention, instead of oil. The social network is the oil extraction technology, that is used to mine people’s data and attention. However, the actual product is this data and attention, which is then sold to advertisers, who are the real customers.

The social media extraction technology could be replaced by other tefhnologies used to mine data and attention, such as videos, music, or chat services. The competitors, however, are other companies selling the same product.

That is FB’s perspective.

Care to provide some details? because FB considers YouTube, Twitter, and the likes as that competition but you may know more.

Americans are smarter - they provide this bait-facade of "usefulness", Germans are more direct and down-to-the-business e.g. there are billboards on the streets of German cities with "privacy campaigns" actively agitating against Facebook, country-wide hysteria against social networks (or even internet in general). Someone certainly pays for it - articles, billboards, etc are not a volunteer work.

I'm sure someone must pay. But I can make assumptions all by myself with little to no help. What I could really use are details, facts, evidence. So I'm forced to reiterate, care to provide some?

I don't mean evidence that people want more privacy and someone is paying/putting up billboards advocating this. Do you have some evidence (anything) that these yet unnamed companies are behind a strategy to stain FB's image (as if it were needed) in order to have the privacy violation market all to the themselves?

Can you at least name one of these companies? Or maybe a hint on why Facebook doesn't even acknowledge this enemy?

An example from the street of a major German city: https://i.imgur.com/owlT9Rv.jpg

I have absolutely no insight into any lobbying activities, obviously.

That doesn't really feel like an anti-FB campaign as much as a campaign to improve the FB experience and an "educational" one to raise awareness related to fake accounts. You can tell as much by their FB page.

That billboard was made by Facebook themselves though, in an attempt to "educate" users on privacy, in a feeble attempt to appear responsible.

> articles, billboards, etc are not a volunteer work.

Are you sure? It's unusual but not impossible. It ought to be possible to find out who is paying for them.

> there are billboards on the streets of German cities with "privacy campaigns" actively agitating against Facebook

I don't recall ever seeing anything like that. So it's either very rare or limited to certain regions. I do recall seeing Facebook billboards which pick up some of the Anti-Facebook rhetoric, e.g. [1]. Those are paid for by Facebook.

> country-wide hysteria against social networks

According to Facebook itself, there are ~29 million daily users[2] in Germany (pop. 82 million).

[1] http://cdn4.spiegel.de/images/image-1065027-galleryV9-qxvz-1... ("I posted something I should not have shared/Delete it and it's gone")

[2] https://allfacebook.de/zahlen_fakten/offiziell-facebook-nutz...

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