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Comment by ordinaryradical | Hacker News Reader

I just don't understand how anyone can believe his vision for "a privacy-focused social network" is even possible this late in the game. There is too much money riding precisely on the reductions of privacy Facebook has enabled for this to be realistic anymore. The ad dollars come from knowing you, not concealing you. Plus, once you're a public company, the rules change—you have shareholders to honor—and if you got to that IPO by being shady or unethical, backing out of that position is going to be nigh impossible. Their entire business model developed itself on a privacy-destroying data-suck of colossal proportions so where is profitability without that?

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

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Some theories:

1. Rebranding Facebook as secure and private

2. If this increases usage, more opportunity to display ads

3. Their data shows they gain more information by monitoring what people publicly share, not say in private

4. Removes all responsibility to work with law enforcement and governments for illegal activity, since it's encrypted

Could you ever consider that Zuck has enough money, and that he really believes in making a product to connect people for the greater good and use ads to make it available to everyone?

No, because Facebook is a public for-profit company, not a non-profit seeking to benefit society.

If someone had told me 15 years ago that Bill Gates would become one the greatest philanthopists of our generation, I would've laughed in their face.

Why? Some of the most venal, greedy, and ruthless people in history made their money then turned to philanthropy to improve their image. I would argue that it was downright predictable, and so would Alfred Nobel. In fact using charity to either improve your public image (as in Gates and many others) is probably only matched by people like Jimmy Saville using charity to give themselves license to continue committing crimes.

What’s surprising to me is that it still works!

Right, the then world's richest started a charitable trust purely so he could improve his public image.

I'm sure the competitive drive to dominate (in generosity) plays a role. Look at the rivalry between Rockefeller and Carnegie for example. Once they grew old and their companies either bought out (Carnegie) or broken up by the feds (Rockefeller) they basically switched to seeing who could get their names put on the most public buildings by building libraries, universities, etc.

What else is he going to do? At that level of wealth, the marginal returns on greed have diminished to almost zero.

So one must find another way to feed ones ego. What is left apart from fulfilling the god complex and saving the world?

Edit: has->have

> What is left apart from fulfilling the god complex and saving the world?

Well one thing I can think of is wanting to make the world better

That's a pretty dark view.

I imagine that Gates played to win in business, as many others do, it's just that he was particularly good at it.

Now he's playing hard and to win in philanthropy.

I doubt he gives 2 bits what the average person thinks of him, at least not enough to throw money at rehabilitating his image. If that was his goal, his philanthropy targets would be different.

As a person, maybe if I squint very very very hard.

Legally, he has a duty to maximize value for his board and investors. And there hasn't been a business model that provides a free consumer web product without monetizing user data.

Why does this shareholder value meme keep getting perpetuated?

Because that's who a CEO reports to and that's how a CEO gets fired.

Some CEO's like Elon and Jobs can spin a great story and hold on by sheer force of personality, but pension funds aren't buying FB in bulk to get more green cars on the road.

> Because that's who a CEO reports to and that's how a CEO gets fired.

That has nothing to do with the legal requirements of the company or the CEO. That would be the same as saying I am "legally required" to go to work tomorrow, because I could get fired for not showing up.

> Legally, he has a duty to maximize value for his board members and investors.

Please stop repeating that nonsense.

Legally, he has a duty to maximize value for his board and investors

You should probably stop using the word "legally" in this context. There have been thousands of companies over the decades that put other things before shareholder value, and somehow managed to not run afoul of the law.

Also, it might help if you provided a citation to this law to bolster your argument.

And there hasn't been a business model that provides a free consumer web product without monetizing user data.

Also false.

I'd love to read a blog post talking about how to make free consumer web apps without monetizing user data. I really would. That's the crux of the issue here -- is there an alternative to the ad-tech playbook?

There's all the Redhat / enterprise open-source examples, but I'm specifically talking about consumer web products. Redhat's product is enterprise infrastructure.

There's free as in a trial or limited functionality to get you to buy the premium offering, but then the business model isn't really based off a free product... the free product is a promotion, not a business model.

You can have one group of premium users subsidize all the free users. In social, the main examples would be LinkedIn or Angelist, but again, access to the user data is the product these companies eventually sell.

There's Wikipedia, but that's a non-profit. Nothing wrong with that, people make a living that way and we need more like it, but I'm talking about companies where profits can serve as a strong motivator. This also excludes government services.

Maybe Google Maps qualified as free in the beginning, but any free service that Google makes is pretty much some clever way to acquire more user data to support other parts of the enterprise. HN itself falls under this category: HN is an ingestion pipeline for YC (the YC app asks for your HN handle, hello future YC app reviewer!).

I know it's a trite and a tired saying, but it really is true: if you're not paying for it, you are the product. That's not bad per-se... another way of looking at it is in the same way the sharing economy unlocked underutilized physical assets, these services have unlocked a new source of wealth not measured by our wallets: our attention. Lets describe it as we pay for these services with our attention-dollars.

My point is anything that's a "free consumer service" business model is really some kind of machine that converts attention-dollars into cash-dollars.

I would love to see a discussion of non-cash-dollar, non-attention-dollar business models. If you can think of a way of giving away Something that People Want (TM) for free without the corrupting influence of optimizing for their attention, well, you've found the next genuinely interesting unicorn.

Absolutely none of what you wrote has anything to do with legal duties.

Yep. When people have dug-in to their trenches, shouting even louder is pointless.

This was about the other half of the reply that hasn't been explored. Lets make threads here more interesting than an infinite uh-huh!/nuh-uhh!/uh-huh! loop.

Duckduckgo seem to have a good way to make money without compromising privacy [0].

I'm certainly not an expert on this subject but monetizing based on relevant content is reasonable. You can still make money without gathering a tremendous amount of user data.

[0]https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates

>Legally

Citation needed!!!

It is not illegal to have other goals than maximizing shareholder value.

For example, Costco. Publicly traded company but the employees are paid well, customers are well taken care of, and the CEO is rewarded for this. In the short-term, Costco could generate an enormous amount of value by automated, reducing wages, and finding cheaper supplies and lowering quality, selling their customer's membership information, etc.

But they don't. And there is nothing illegal about it.

That's irreconcilable with his actions.

Why would a person who believes those things have made the "dumb fucks" quote?

I'm no fan of Zuckerberg, but he said that quote over a decade ago, and people can change their beliefs and values.

He's done plenty in that decade that affirms the quote.

All of his fairly recent congressional "testimony" fills in the gaps quite nicely. He might not have used identical curse words, but, to me, the same attitude shown through quite brightly. I really don't see a change whatsoever.

Yes, people can.

He very obviously hasn't.

That's a nice ideal, but Zuckerberg hasn't lived up to it.

I see that quote being referenced a lot, and given when it was made I'm curious what it says about whether or not we believe that people have the capacity to change.

Do something mildly stupid when you're 20, and if someone finds out about it when you're 40, you lose your job.

That's the upside-down society we live in today.

Showing complete contempt for the privacy of your users and then using your massive monopoly on social networking to propagandize the death of privacy isn't "mildly stupid".

Such is life in the age of post-privacy. By the way, Zuck didn't explicitly renounce that horseshit when he announced the new privacy-focused Facebook. Probably hoping nobody remembers to avoid detracting from the believability of the current horseshit.

>...and use ads to make it available to everyone?

Could you ever believe that's not all that he does with ads?

Privately he has enough money, sure, but as the CEO of Facebook he has a responsibility to maximize the value of the company.

Personally I believe he should pull a Bill Gates, hand over the reigns and take his philanthropy private.

Not a chance. I'd trust him about as far as I could throw him. If there is one exec of a major web property that has lost all benefit of the doubt then it is Mark Zuckerberg.

No, because I wasn't born yesterday. There is no limit to human greed or hubris. Facebook is a publicly traded company and is expected to maximize value for its shareholders.

A common feature request for my app: remove FB login!

These are users who didn't even use it. But just seeing the Facebook login option there next to email (it was the only OAuth) gave them the creeps. These aren't tech savvy users either, just regular small town businesses

I think Facebook has a long, long, long way to go towards brand repair before anyone can 'trust' it in any way

Many facebook buttons are trackers. I can understand people's nervousness.

The use of Facebook login immediately makes me suspicious of any site/service's overall security and privacy practices.

Have you ever looked at what exactly those facebook login buttons load? I don't feel safe browsing sites with facebook integration anymore unless I'm running uMatrix or am in a container.

Ugh it is actually outrageous. On client sites, I use an icon and an anchor tag with noopener/noreferrer.

One client really wanted Facebook login so I had to make a Facebook account. That was a dark day.

On a somewhat related note, that business is no longer operating. I still host their site for free, partly out of smugness as they took none of my advice.

Does uBlock stop Facebook tracking? Or is there such a thing as Faceblock?

uMatrix plus the firefox facebook container plugin goes a long way...

Facebook container! I didn't even know that existed. Thanks!

>I just don't understand how anyone can believe his vision for "a privacy-focused social network"...

People need to understand, ANYTHING you use on the internet opens you up wide to privacy violations. Anything you use on the internet can end up in the hands of law enforcement. And certainly any SOCIAL network is, by its very nature, NOT private.

There is no way to be on the internet, and be completely opaque to the larger world at the same time. Zuckerberg is lying to you. So are Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, and Wire. If you're worth it, the US can track you. (Not just the US, several other nations and organizations can as well.)

Your buddy who told you that they couldn't find you behind that pseudonym as long as you were using a VPN? Yeah... he lied.

But here's the real problem, no one cares.

No one cares about privacy, because they all feel that they have nothing to hide. I know the feeling, I understand the feeling. But this is bigger than us as individuals.

The internet needs to be rearchitected, bit by bit. In concert with that effort, we need to agitate for some laws that prevent data sharing. Some laws that have real teeth.

It's perfectly possibly they'll increase privacy, in the sense that instead of blasting updates to everyone you send them to specific people, with an autodelete.

This doesn't interfere with tracking.

Most people, when they think about privacy, think about the disclosure of specific posts to unintended audiences. They often don't think about the tracking beacons silently categorizing everything.

So in short, it's perfectly possible to have "privacy friendly" Facebook - if your definition of privacy doesn't extend to being free from ad trackers.

This is another issue, everyone's definition of "privacy" is different. I want total privacy, which I can't have. That said, you're correct to say that there are some people out there who just want a little privacy.

>The ad dollars come from knowing you, not concealing you.

Advertising dollars are far more lucrative if you think you can trust where you're sharing your deepest, darkests...

Imagine what people would share between themselves if it wasn't "public for the world to see". Imagine how many more data points that would produce for targeted advertisements on the Facebook platform, alone.

Edit: Including necessary reference to Bill Hicks[0].

[0] - https://youtu.be/GaD8y-CGhMw

I believe "privacy-first social network" begins with a pretext to have privacy from advertisers, data hoarders, etc.

> Advertising dollars are far more lucrative if you think you can trust where you're sharing your deepest, darkests...

You mean like a Google search?

If you don't mean a Google search, I'm not sure what you could mean. What could possibly be more intimate than a person's lifelong history of general queries in their pursuit of knowledge and personal identity?

Oftentimes those queries are even natural language sentence fragments that directly convey the person's intentions.

What more are you claiming a company could infer by convincing their userbase that their data remains private?

>If you don't mean a Google search, I'm not sure what you could mean.

If you're considering buying a motorcycle and have a friend (or a group of friends) that own(s) a motorcylce, are you more likely to ask that friend (or that group) the pros/cons of owning a motorcycle and for their recommendations or are you far more likely to use "nature language sentences" in Google to illicit that information (e.g.: "I'm thinking of buying a motorcycle")?

I'm going to posit that the former occurs far more frequently than the latter and that this is the potential "untapped market" for targeted advertising that a "private social network" would be after.

Who are the people that aren't already using gmail/facebook/apple to ask their friend group this question in the first place?

Regardless, it's pretty easy to infer from the person's Google searches what their friends told them. And if that user has an Android phone Google also has their location data to cross-reference with it, plus data gleaned from CC purchases and probably lots of other sources I haven't yet read about.

This is a PR stunt, as pretty much everything FB says about data privacy.

It’s exactly why he/she is pushing for it. Because they can now hide behind the wall that is privacy. People can do whatever they want behind that wall and Facebook can and will not care to monitor any activity. This is their way of copping out.

Facebook can easily run "a privacy-focused social network" that's not Facebook, but a separate, very different product for separate, very different audiences.

Just announcing a diet version of news feed. That is it. Slowly routing traffic to that new facade. They don't have to something super revolutionary, just bit by bit.

I think the best way to fulfill this privacy-centric vision would be to create a decentralized system--something that FB, sadly, isn't really interested in.

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