Don’t Trust Facebook with Your Love Life
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Certainly, there are big problems with some aspects of tech and they ought to be reported on. But it seems like there's something a bit more going on here than that, given their willingness to publish silly, conceptually thin articles like this. This entire editorial is essentially content free. The only point it makes is to summarize Facebook's shortcomings, which didn't require the launch of a new dating feature to do, if it had something new to say. But it didn't, so it used FB's announcement as a pretext to publish a set of stock criticisms.
I dream of a world free of editorials, or at least a HN front page without them.
Seems an uptick in flame bait editorials as of late.
Would it be reasonable to assume the title Don't Trust Facebook with Your Love Life could possibly only be opinion? Would a reasonable person expect to see data-driven research after clicking through?
Yes, in a font smaller than and above the title that is very light against the background and reasonably easy to miss.
> Would it be reasonable to assume the title Don't Trust Facebook with Your Love Life could possibly only be opinion? Would a reasonable person expect to see data-driven research after clicking through?
Perhaps it's a clickbait title with real substance, or perhaps a great research piece. The only way to know is to read it.
I get that reading is involuntary for literate adults, but I believe it is possible to not engage with the words beyond that.
Perhaps you should heed your own advice.
They have sections, and the op-Ed’s and Eds are only in the opinion section.
Perhaps on the paper, or the site itself. On HN it is not reasonably obvious.
Going online, paired with the rise of social media changed what it meant for content to be "good" - redefined it to share worthy and click based, monetized mostly by ads. Now, no one, including the famed NYT does good classical journalism - they do what gets them shares and clicks.
On closer examination of social media demographics, you can see why news has pivoted to opinion - because millennials share and click more of it, especially the opinions they approve of.
A demographic shift in HN user base is also likely the reason for more opinion making it to the top of the charts
Now, before "the internet" (read: its commercial, world-wide success), in-depth research was costly, and it could not be copied easily. Newspapers had a reputation to hold up. It was easier to compete on information. Now the competition is much more fierce, and many people make/share news gratis, so it ends up competing with "free" is difficult.
As for NYT, there's some good people working there like Runa Sandvik, but I guess it works like every large news organization...
An editorial is typically just an opinion piece on a currently relevant topic, and that's exactly what this is.
Not every article needs to be an in-depth feature with peer reviewed analysis.
Whether it’s lavishing praise on Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi elite, cheerleading the Iraq war, reporting as if the #MeToo movement was somehow localized entirely in Hollywood and not experienced by normal people, desperately bolstering Hillary with Bernie hit piece after Bernie hit piece, adding constant fuel to the dumpster fire that is the US culture war, or totally clueless tech reporting, it has been become worse and worse with each passing year in my opinion.
I was a subscriber for many years and recently cancelled and it’s been wonderful to distance myself from the clickbait.
https://www.nytimes.com/by/charlie-warzel
"Before that, he was a senior technology writer at BuzzFeed News" (that alone explains a lot)
And almost all of these are posted here
There are maybe 2 or 3 major companies (Mozilla, Apple?) that have shown any interest in protecting their users privacy and not abusing and mining all the data they collect from their users, who have unsurprisingly not understood the implications of the massive amount of data that can be collected over the past decade or so.
Especially when they’re in competition with bricks and mortar stores that can’t use “double Dutch” and “double Irish” tax dodges.
The tax evasion is a very important, but more general and unfortunately pervasive problem of our society. I believe we'll do it a disservice if we try to target it narrowly like that. It will get drowned out by whataboutism and the bigger but specific issues. None of that can derail it when looking at the bigger picture.
Politicians have more to say about chicken sandwiches, library story time, and and NFL pregames when their actual job is exactly this sort of problem, not being professional culture pundits.
People still see Tech as benign, but it has been twisted from the early starry-eyed technologists who wanted to change the world for the better, and it has become just another big industry power block that looks after only it's own profits to the exclusion of everything else.
We have to face it: we’re not helping the world.
We allow people to enter into all sorts of arrangements where they compromise their rights, such as by giving up their right to sue in court or not seeking employment in the same industry.
We allow people to enter into onerous credit card agreements, and we all agree that it is voluntary. And we say that when an 18 year old youth purchases cigarettes, that again, they are exercising their intellect in an act of agency.
And then we come to the issue of software licenses, which also begs the question as people trade privacy for services, "Yes, you are an individual of formidable agency, are you not?"
Now we’re in a similar place with tech. Tech entrepreneurs have been branded as ”disruptors” saving us from the establishment for the better part of two decades but now there’s a bigger diversity of spins on these tech stories, leaning a bit on the negative side. I think the pendulum will swing back to positive if these companies get their act together and do more to protect users, and especially if the governments bust their monopolies. That would maybe generate a lot of sympathy.
If it's not in the public's face at least semi-regularly, they'll forget.
Having a digital log of your love life and exchanges can have an impact. That is not an "anti-tech"-assessment. Maybe the article is boring to you, but I see dire need of more
NYT is certainly biased and they have have their own mostly economic incentives regarding big-tech. That has nothing to do with technology itself.
What's more concerning than the NYT fulfilling its primary function is the occasional apologia in the HN comments, by people who (if we want to talk about bias), probably have a stake in perpetuating the state of affairs.
This is an opinion piece. In pretty much every newspaper I skip this section.
Broadly speaking, there are large swaths of the population for whom the New York Times (and, on the other side, Wall Street Journal and Fox News) anti-tech “biases” resonate. Not just emotionally, but because big tech has repeatedly and callously burned those groups.
They are looking to organise. Finding common arguments and common allies is part of the political process the Fourth Estate catalyses.
Would you like me to go on?
I'm taking issue with the idea that there is a large group of people that has unilaterally been harmed by tech that isn't defined as "the people that have been harmed by tech".
A counterexample might be "people harmed by car accidents" -- there are a lot of those too, year after year, yet we don't see a column dedicated to anti-automobile narratives popping up in the nytimes. I'd hazard a guess that it's because car accidents affect only a small portion of all groups (or just very small groups) no matter how you slice them -- unless you slice the entire population into two sets of "people harmed by car accidents" and that set's compliment.
Not only that, but unlike with car accidents we would all have a very difficult time agreeing what constitutes the group of "people harmed by tech". Some pro-privacy advocate might want to include all people on the ad-sponsored internet in that group. You apparently want to include taxi drivers and journalists. These are some very strange bedfellows that can only be cobbled together in the most tenuous way using a narrative that scapegoats tech companies in general.
Addressing push back about specific changes made by specific companies from specific groups? I've got no problem with that. Cover it all day. Grouping all of these issues into one big narrative and pointing a mob of angry pitchfork bearing people at it telling them that these companies are the source of all your problems? Yikes, that seems like it could go really really badly!
Why don't we talk about the NYT's fairly open pro data-privacy bias - which is actually what it is.
> You’re in private mode. Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode.
Why are you attributing bad faith to the commenter?
It's a reasonable objection, and many have questioned whether its the moral duty of facebook engineers to quit over privacy issues. Blocking privacy mode is an extremely aggressive and intrusive stance, although some other publications followed suit. NYT is especially heavy on tracking [0] The journalist who write for the Times should take personal responsibility and find a different company or profession. I have a feeling the journalists are smart enough that they know they can find employment elsewhere.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/23/opinion/data-...
Because people don't like feeling wrong, even if they aren't particularly wrong, and I've seen many otherwise very intelligent people say and do really stupid things when confronted with information that contradicts their beliefs. Just to be clear this does not make said commenter a bad person, it just makes them a human, with a brain that does occasionally really shitty things when it doesn't want to think.
It's less about attributing bad faith and more just acknowledging that we're all imperfect talking chimps here.
> It's a reasonable objection, and many have questioned whether its the moral duty of facebook engineers to quit over privacy issues.
I would never say another person needs to quit a job over ethical issues, because anyone of decent moral fiber and an objective mind is probably already wrestling with that problem, and having a disinterested third party dispensing advice from On High with zero skin in the game is not going to improve that situation. Alternatively, they could just not care, which is less likely, but also not going be affected by that same third party. Basically what I'm saying is there are numerous possibilities in that interaction but none lead to change, so I don't discuss it. It's moot.
All I'm saying is that the problem of making money in journalism is something that has no clear solution, and acting like the NYT is being hypocritical for using trackers while railing against trackers is a clear example of the Ad Hominem fallacy.
If this is the case, why is NYT showing absolutely no innovation in monetizing their platform?
> I have a feeling you're smart enough to know that's not the case and so you're resorting to a just plain bad argument
Insulting and unsubstantiated; how nice.
Because they don't have ideas? I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take with such a complex problem that so many other companies are having a difficult time solving. Why expend further resources trying to fling more shit at the wall to see what sticks, when your current modal, albeit not ideal, does serve the purpose?
Not everyone has to be, or even should be an innovator. The NYT should be innovating on better and newer techniques of journalism, since that's what they do. It's not like Apple created a new bank for Apple Card to try and make it better, they contracted that part of a product they wanted to offer to a 3rd party that already knew how to do it, and I'd imagine if a revenue model came along that suited them, they'd do the same thing and dump trackers and ad-tech. It's likely they're just waiting for that.
> Insulting and unsubstantiated; how nice.
I mean, it was unsubstantiated, yes, but I think it was also a positive-leaning assumption? I'm not sure why you're insulted by that, but I apologize.
Times Editorial could publish articles criticizing Times Corporate, but while I would be very disappointed if Times Corporate was given a free pass, I don't expect them to receive extra scrutiny either.
And if Times Corporate isn't getting extra scrutiny, how much of a story would there be? The Times's data privacy practices, while not ideal, are nowhere near the level of what's going on at Google and Facebook.
The tipping poing was the Trump victory. Before the election the NYT and other mainstream media outlets were trumpeting how much better/hipper the DNC was at using social platforms to organize voters than the Republican party. If Clinton would have won, this characterization would have remained and anybody complaning about Russian interference in elections would have been branded a McCarthyist.
Implying that journalism has no value and people should mechanically make.. accounting software apps for a large organisation instead of uncovering and presenting information about those in power is hideous.
It's no surprise that Trump supporters are all over it.
I'm not sure why you are trying to do it for them.
I'm also unsure why folks think they haven't had specific goals/slants in editorial picking/writing in the past. This is not a new phenomenon, for any newspaper.
I happen to think this kind of thing has been fairly destructive to the credibility of newspapers over the past 20-30 years, but what do i know.
Is there a source for this? It's pretty bold to claim they've admitted to criticizing tech companies out of spite. Especially when there are justifiable reasons for trying take them to task, such as Facebook's privacy record.
Sure. We work in tech, and see that the web has hurt the newspaper business model. Therefore, we protect our ego in the face of any criticism from the traditional press towards tech by rationalizing it away as vindictive rather than ask ourselves if the criticisms are valid and would also be written by a healthier press. And by casting it as a bias, we can avoid contemplating if more tech-savvy reporters would have noticed how morally bankrupt "tech" is sooner and/or provide sharper and more knowledgeable criticism that doesn't rely on poor approximations of goings-on in a domain inscrutable to laypersons.
These are some of the largest companies in the world, make decisions that effect the lives of billions but act like their shit doesn't stink and don't want people looking to closely at the societal ramifications of their business model.
If anything, I'd say the press is too kind and deferential to the half-truths their PR departments pump out.
>Follow @privacyproject on Twitter and The New York Times Opinion Section on Facebook and Instagram.
As much as tech companies try to make them self look up small upstarts fighting uphill battle, they are one of the most influential industry of our time.
In 90s there were oil companies and tobacco companies on the front pages, now it's tech companies time.
An editorial is not intended to produce new content, e.g. report on new news, only to state opinions about the known state of an issue. To that end, this article cites a great deal of highly detailed content to which it links towards in making its argument. I had no idea there was a newly reported data breach just on wednesday this week, for example. I'm also certain that tens of thousands of people will first learn of FB's new dating initiative via this editorial, and in that regard it is valuable that the NYT will put a much needed cautionary spin on this information. Too many people still have no regard for the harm they do to not just themselves but all of their social contacts who have any digital connection to them whatsoever when they give too much information to companies like Facebook.
it is most certainly valid to point out how inappropriate it would be to begin giving Facebook a whole new class of sensitive, personal content for which they can mishandle and sell to foreign governments for illicit or unethical purposes.
I’m not sure this is an obvious perspective to most people in America.
I’m very pro public awareness which educates the layman on what information these companies are collecting, how they’re using it, and how long it can affect you for.
Especially for the older generations which seem more susceptible to actual fake news, and may have a lesser understanding of what this tech is and how it works.
And especially for younger generations who may not instinctively realize that every button they click, picture they post, and website they browse is being mined, logged, harvested, aggregated, and sold to anyone who asks for it with a couple bucks to spare.
Also, as the parent to your comment stated, I didn’t know there was a data breach Wednesday, and I’m a software engineer.
It’s funny. When the media doesn’t cover something enough, people say “why is CNN talking about the Kardashians?? Climate change is happening!”. Seems the converse occurs too “Why is the NYT covering this again!”
This doesn't mean that "big tech" isn't worthy of criticism or scrutity, but it can both be true that there are legitimate complaints about these companies and that traditional media outlets are going overboard with endless attacks on them due to external agendas.
Is it a "bias" if they're right?
Contrary to popular believe the real problem with privacy violations isn't "that some creep might be listening in on your most private moments – the real problem is the power that stems from that information asymmetry on a societal level. In a democracy systems like these are the ones that never should have been – read this in the most frankensteinian tone you can imagine.
That being said: this ismy opinion and at the same time I am a DIY persons, I build soft and hardware – but being a good tech person also means that you shouldn't blindly praise every "smart" thing that has a microcontroller in it, if it performs worse than the 30 year old version of the same thing your grandma has in her kitchen. Being a good tech person means realizing that electronic voting has fundamental conceptual flaws that the oldschool paper version hasn't or realizing that sometimes a sleek and modern looking touchscreen isn't the best interface to choose for your application.
In short: if you love tech, don't lie to yourself about what it is and what it isn't. If you love tech, have the respect to see it for what it is and what (in the right hands) it could be.
I agree with your second sentence entirely. To be clear, criticizing tech is completely fair and important. My point is that the NYT, it seems to me, is pushing this a little too hard. I think the evidence for that is in fairly thin-pretext articles like this one, or the Amazon driver liability "investigation".
> Contrary to popular believe the real problem with privacy violations isn't "that some creep might be listening in on your most private moments – the real problem is the power that stems from that information asymmetry on a societal level. In a democracy systems like these are the ones that never should have been – read this in the most frankensteinian tone you can imagine.
I half agree with you here. I do think these systems being put in place have tremendous social consequences. Unfortunately though, I think the ships have sailed, and I don't really see regulation or anything much else putting them back to port. People have voted with their feet and they simply don't value privacy the way you or I do.
> That being said: this ismy opinion and at the same time I am a DIY persons, I build soft and hardware – but being a good tech person also means that you shouldn't blindly praise every "smart" thing that has a microcontroller in it, if it performs worse than the 30 year old version of the same thing your grandma has in her kitchen. Being a good tech person means realizing that electronic voting has fundamental conceptual flaws that the oldschool paper version hasn't or realizing that sometimes a sleek and modern looking touchscreen isn't the best interface to choose for your application.
> In short: if you love tech, don't lie to yourself about what it is and what it isn't. If you love tech, have the respect to see it for what it is and what (in the right hands) it could be.
Wholeheartedly agree here.
1) There's a general anti-tech sentiment that is a huge defining part of our zeitgeist. It's only a few years old and I'm already tired of it and articles like this one contribute to the fatigue.
2) The NYT is leaning very hard into this fad for a variety of reasons - good for their bottom line, good for their self-image, etc. There was a very funny one a few weeks ago where the NYT "took down" Google's terrible ToS - until someone (in the comments) pointed out the NYT one was even worse. If you're shouting and pointing at someone else, people won't have time to look at you.
3) Lately, I keep being reminded of the Selfish Gene, which has a few chapters devoted to Evolutionary Stable Strategies. In essence, Tech has gotten so big that being a "tech critic" has become a lucrative (high reward/low cost) position to take, like being a cheater in a monogamous population. Any environment can support a certain percentage of such defectors, though if there are suddenly too many, it stops being lucrative and a new stable equilibrium will be reached. I highly recommend it, it has really helped me make sense of these rapid shifts.
The biggest and richest tech companies all abuse the privacy of their so-called customers. The customers don't really own or control the devices they buy any more, nor do they control the software. The companies decide at their discretion which version is used and if someone is allowed to use a piece of software.
Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook could instantly cut anyone from their online lives and they are able to disable physical devices and locally downloaded applications.
Most of the big tech companies are ruthless monopolies which are exploiting people with deeply addictive apps, hoovering up every tiny detail of their lives, and selling it to advertisers while also frequently losing that information to hackers, and being used by autocratic foreign governments to swing elections to candidates that suit their purposes.
So it's right that there's an anti-tech sentiment, and it's right that privacy concerns are reported on.
Nah. They made the point that dating apps in particular collect a lot of deeply personal info, that Facebook is using it as an opportunity to merge data from your Instagram and Facebook accounts, that dating profiles will be separate from Facebook profiles.
But most importantly, this is an opinion piece.
It logically points out that letting Facebook be your dating app is a bad idea if you value your privacy.
And how could you make that point more effectively than by listing Facebook's record on privacy?
Even if it is bad, other options are substantially worse.
First, the main website that took into account preferences (OKCupid) is almost gone, Tinderified. And Tinder itself does not look at preferences at all. If you are a type of person who dates people randomly met on a bus stop or in a bar, it may work for you. If you expect any more, it is a lottery.
Second, only a small fraction of people who are looking for partner(s) are active on any dating apps. At the same time (anecdotally) a lot of people meet at a party organized by a friend, or through some special interest groups (i.e.: common friends, social groups or interests).
Side note: I already had quite a few great dates with people I met on Facebook (first interacting on some groups). Then, with common interests, seeing how one interacts in public, and potentially - common friends, there is a much higher chance to have commonalities. Plus, they are more than a "business card".
Filtering - in software engineering terms, there is a difference between search with O(n) (going through all elements) and in O(log(n)) with a binary search.
Let's assume that I would find 1% people good for dating (usually a tweet-length message is not enough). It is a lot of wasted time. Again, if you care more about looks than personality, then Tinder is a perfect tool. (Once I found a relationship on Tinder, and yes, the description stood out, but overall the signal-to-noise ratio is poor.)
On OKC I can preselect for some things that are required.
Also, if you're willing to give people-you're-not-attracted-to a chance, how is Tinder any different? Are you saying you are never liked by someone on Tinder that you aren't attracted to? Nothing is stopping you from sticking around for their potentially amazing personality. I bet you just don't because you need some initial attraction like the rest of us whether online or at the bar.
Usually this complaint has to do with men getting no matches. But it's basically men complaining that women with options don't pick them, and online dating sucks because it gives women too many options making it hard for them to compete. It's like country boys complaining about women moving to the city.
The realities of dating were already brutal before online dating.
Somewhat true, but in the real world you can grow attracted to someone who's appearance you initially did not have a positive reaction to. I know this from experience. This does not occur in online dating, which encourages treating people as commodities.
Sure, looks matter. But for me (given a similar age), I am 2-3 orders of magnitude (!) pickier in personality/goals/etc.
You may say that for casual sex personality does not matter, but even then I want someone fun to talk to, safe, and drama-free. And for your record, I don't have a problem with getting matches. (Now in Asia, and as a European I get tons.)
Also, it is maybe why I don't approach random strangers at a bar. Unless a science conference, rarely "fun to talk to".
Talk about misaligned incentives!
The dearth of effective dating platforms is the expected end state of the current "pay per use" model. The popular sites earn more from repeat customers than from single-time customers. That is fine for general goods & services. However it goes against the usual idea for dating: to find a partner & establish a good, lasting relationship in as few "attempts" as possible. Users successfully coupling up are effectively "lost" for the platform that facilitated it.
What would it take to build a sustainable dating platform? First up, it would need to benefit the most from a successful & permanent match, rather from repeated use.
As much as I dislike Facebook for their abysmal handling of privacy, I figure FB Dating suffers less form misaligned incentives than standalone dating platforms. Presumably users will remain on FB proper anyway, whether their dates are successful or not.
Come to think of it, the "traditional" (for lack of better word) society built on nuclear families just might have been geared that way - to benefit the most from people finding partners & becoming long term couples.
> What would it take to build a sustainable dating platform?
Between "earning more" and "sustainable" there's is a broad spectrum of possibilities. I know from past experience that it's absolutely possible to skip many deliberate ways of "earning more" and still be sustainable (even highly profitable). Perhaps you won't conquer the market without shady tactics nowadays when competition is fierce, but you certainly don't have to screw your customers to be highly successful.
Since finding the right person is a numbers game, I'd say the best path is an easy path. Something between speed dating and a normal date, where the goal is to check for chemistry as well as advance past the initial, in-person interaction. Start with having a few like/dislike parameters met, then get you both face to face.
Here's my idea for that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17356401
If we simplified and just went for a real-world, slower version of speed dating, where each pair would get 15 minutes with each other, it wouldn't control for like/dislike parameters. IE: I definitely wouldn't date a smoker. Having it start online then move to real-world, asap, helps to match likes and dislikes more closely.
1. monetization. How do you ensure your platform can at least cover its costs? The users want to know your platform wont go dark one fine day because of an overdue server bill. Better yet, that it won't get yanked like many of Google's cool projects due to insufficient profitability.
2. incentives alignment. How do you ensure the incentives for your platform are to get the users paired up permanently, which usually would mean they stop perusing your platform? Unlike typical services, a dating platform is one such that most people want to be able to ultimately do away with.
3. fulfillment. How do you make users feel they are putting in reasonably hard effort? How do you let them increase the effort if they so desire? People do feel fulfillment from putting in effort; cf. a lot of computer games that grant satisfaction through daily grind.
[edit]
A throw-away thought:
current dating platforms operate in "push" model: the singles make themselves available.
How about you make a "pull" platform - let already established couples find & match up great candidates to join their social circles - as new couples.
Making the already established couples your main users would solve the obstacles 1, 2, and 3. You would take money from the already established couples for finding & matching up new great, interesting, friendly couples for them. You would have the already established couples "grind" (put in the effort) for finding & setting up new ones.
It works the same in healthcare. If we are cured once for good, they charge us once. If there are good prophylactics and we stay healthy - even worse.
Yet, somehow the system works, to a certain degree. (Why? I don't know. Maybe there is more stigma with destroying someone's health for monetary gain.)
...
Maybe there should be a service, for which we pay ONLY during times when we are healthy (or have happy romantic/sexual life)? In that way, the incentives would be aligned.
Any ideas of how to do so?
...
As one remark: a lifelong relationship is not the only goal of dating. Some people look for a short-term, or even an ONS. Also, if a relationship goes bad it is better when it does not stays for a lifetime (in the worst-case scenario, when one's life ends with a murder, or - suicide).
Well for starters, there is still some level of competition in the pharma industry. If you're trying to make a better version of a competitor's product, changing "It makes X go away for 2 weeks" to "It cures X" is a good strategy.
Secondly, it's not as though we can program treatments to act in exact accordance with executive whims. We use what works.
(To be clear, none of this is to say there isn't a problem. I am listing reasons the situations is not as disastrous as it theoretically could be.)
But this is basically what Facebook already does, so if you already have a Facebook account and trust Facebook with that data I don't see a reason to trust them further.
You're not wrong. I feel it's worth pointing out, however, that the opposite (paid/monetised -> not collecting data) is frequently assumed when it really doesn't hold.
You don't have to convince me, I deleted my account years ago.
[quote]
"There are no plans for ads and no plans for subscriptions.”
No ads.
No revenue.
Just love.
[/quote]
... is loaded with irony and accuracy (and a good reminder) IMHO.
Also I’m curious as to how this feature make sense in the scenario where you have users creating an FB account just for the sake of using FB Dating and how effective would this be in finding a compatible match?
The brain is still a formidable computing device not easily emulated or understood. AI Engines of today are limited because they don't have intuition like the human Brain. They can't feel like something is off or a situation doesn't smell right. We are learning to master the rational decision-making process, but the emotional processes of the mind are what make us more than just drones. It's the X factor that makes life interesting.
All it takes is a bad date, some awkward rejection, or a stalker experience to start feeling ill about using Facebook dating, and by extension, Facebook.
2 days ago; HN comments: Facebook is clearly lying about the phone number breach as it has recently been added to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20880917
1 week ago; HN comments: How do Facebook employees live with themselves downloading all android std libs? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20840931
Today: HN Comment: FBS data breaches aren't anything special
Additionally FB has a track record of being extremely reckless with your data and being dishonest about what data it actually gathers, how it is being used and who it is being shared with.
But then again I'm neither on fb, tinder nor anything like that so I'll let people decide for themselves.
Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age https://www.amazon.com/Tools-Weapons-Promise-Peril-Digital/d...
At this point, you should NOT trust ANY company or startup (especially VC funded) with any data you give to them and you should treat all companies with full suspicion.
Security mishaps, leaks, Data misuse and most importantly spying are the reasons why we should not trust any of them.
It shouldn’t end with Facebook, Google or any other surveillance capitalist company or startup. ALL companies spy on you with analytics and tracking agents and it would be naive to think otherwise.
And you certainly should not trust them with your love life!
It’s not that “Business” is inherently bad in some way,it’s that corporations are relatively unthinking optimising entities that move towards what’s profitable.
Without legal frameworks to constrain them they’ll run over you or anything else including the environment to maximise shareholder value.
It’s their raison d’être for existing.
I've always thought it strange how people marry or get into relationships generally with people in their immediate or secondary circle of friends/colleagues/classmates when it seems incredibly unlikely that the best match for you is in that group out of a few billion people in the world. Personally I'd love a tool that found me the optimal match even if they weren't in my circle and I think FB could probably deliver that with their dating app if they wanted to
People don't trust Facebook because of the other things they've done very recently.
i.e. the tax avoidance, the shadow profiles of non-users, the marketing of addictive game purchases to children, manipulation of time lines to alter user mood and everything else in a very long list of negatives that's been in the news in the last few years.
Until some length of time has passed between the way Facebook has historically operated and them acting honourably, each new product they build will be seen through the lens of a bad actor expanding its empire.
Repeating "cambridge analytica scandal" will not make it less of a scandal than "obama campaing scandal". And FB already has all the data they need for their dating offering, if anything, they are withholding people from risking exposing these data to other services. What nonsense.
1- It's an opinion piece. Opinion pieces are never expected to uphold the same levels of journalistic standard as reporting. It's understood to literally just be, one guys opinion. Some are good. Some are bad. Take with a grain of salt, call me in the morning.
2- Explain to me why Facebook deserves to be trusted and this guy is making mountains out of molehills? Do you genuinely believe FB is a misunderstood good actor here, or are you just annoyed about something else? (the NYT, "anti-tech" journalism in general, the rise of anti-corporation sentiments over the last 10 years?)