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Comment by labster | Hacker News Reader

Google tends to build tools that make you more productive on the open web, while Facebook tends to build timesinks that make you less productive in a walled garden. The value proposition is different between them, and so we give Google more slack because it's more valuable to our lives.

And at least Google doesn't tend to reset our privacy settings to "share freaking everything" every year or so like Facebook did. On that, they're actually less scummy than my bank is with data sharing.

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No doubt that social media is often a waste of time. However Facebook's products are also great tools for communication. And Google's YouTube is likely the largest time sink on the net.

But that doesn't really matter. Even if Google made only the most innocent products known to exist, how can that justify that they abuse those products and build huge databases of private data to be shared with their advertisers?

> And at least Google doesn't tend to reset our privacy settings to "share freaking everything" every year or so like Facebook did.

Can you elaborate on this? Do you have at least one example of Facebook undoing a user's privacy settings?

"Since 2009, Facebook has been under investigation by federal authorities and American senators in the wake of a series of incidents involving the sudden change of users' privacy settings, most notably Facebook Beacon, which shut down that same year."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/future-changes-t...

Beacon was a clusterf*ck, no discussion. Even the commercial partners were surprised by the lack of consent from the affected users.

However this was a feature that they launched 12 years ago. Since then Facebook have added more and more granular privacy controls and they have made their API and Ads product increasingly more data restricted in the past 5-6 years.

I don't believe there has ever been a case, where they have reset a privacy setting that was specifically set by the user.

So if a user changes all the settings to say "only ever share with my friends", and then Facebook creates a new service and sets it to "share with all companies", that's not a change of a privacy setting because the setting didn't exist before? Seriously?

It's a pattern of behavior on the part of Facebook to not act in the public interest until faced with overwhelming legal or public opinion issues. At least Google is smart enough to see which way the wind is blowing. But sure, continue to support a company that was complicit in the Rohingya genocide though willful ignorance to problems in general. I'm not a Stallmanite but there has to be a point where enough is enough.

This is not to take away from the good engineers who worked on React or HHVM. Just consider working for a less morally bankrupt company, please.

I imagine what will happen if/when FB in their cancerous ecosystem decide to add/provide email services. I am afraid that young people will use this as one-stop-shop and guarantee that they will never leave this spider web.

Imagine if on top of everything they now collect they can also see every email content (like Gmail, Hotmail, end others).

Facebook did offer @facebook.com email addresses starting end of 2010 and had them available until I believe 2014.

https://m.facebook.com/notes/facebook/see-the-messages-that-...

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