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Comment by throwaway_kufu | Hacker News Reader

Zuckerberg could make his personal tracking publicly available 24/7 to FB users, it would demonstrate what’s being collected and show his users he is willing to give up his privacy and data for the great benefit that is FB. But if he won’t do it, then why would anyone else give up their data and privacy?

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If I remember right during the Congress hearing one politician asked Zuckerberg where he went yesterday or something similar and Zuckerberg declined to answer.

So privacy is only for the rich...

Didn't Zuck buy up the homes around his own for extra privacy?

Privacy for me, none for thee.

To be fair that's something I'd do as well if I could afford it, even if nobody knew who I was.

Musk done the opposite. Even when you own heaps of land people still know you’re somewhere there. So it’s better to free up those houses and use hotels, etc to jump from place to place.

I would say "privacy is only for those who value it". Nobody rich or poor is forced to use Facebook (and plenty of wealthy people do use it).

I think Zuckerberg is more sensitized to privacy issues because he knows how the sausage is made.

> Nobody rich or poor is forced to use Facebook (and plenty of wealthy people do use it).

That's technically not true though. Whenever website developers add the FB Like button. Those scripts are collecting data about you where you have a FB account or not by placing a cookie on your browser. If the next website you visit also has the Like button, they are tracking you. In this case, we are all "forced" to be tracked.

FB's real tracking ability isn't on their platform, but thousands of app and website developers that incorporate their Login and Like buttons.

Facebook has violated their own privacy policy many times, faced legal penalties and settled with the FCC for their violations, then violated their settlement agreements with additional data breaches.

He isn’t more sensitized to privacy issues, so much as he can afford to spend the time and money required to protect himself...most people, like the majority of his users responsible for him having that kind of wealth, don’t have the luxury.

Why only Zuck and not every FB employee?

They all benefit from what FB does, just because he makes the most from it doesn't mean the rest of them aren't partially responsible.

I wonder, do you think FB expects all employees to use FB?

yeah, in the interview they ask you to build clones of a service and are shocked if you haven’t used it.

Ironically they do, internally everything is around a Facebook profile (granted this was true when I was last there years ago). I imagine it’s still the same.

Is it public profile or professional profile. My company gave me an Id which is used for anything, but I consider it as company property and not my personal id.

Not all of them, but it would be very strange not to use the product you work on, even in some rudimentary form.

Sadly, I have first hand exeperience working on software where the devs clearly 1) did not use the software they created, 2) did not fully understand the purpose of the software

Isn't that most software?

I think "most" is way too broad. I don't think I have one program on my system that is like that. I find this is typically found when a company with no internal dev uses a lowest bidder to offshore software.

Do you think that devs from FAANG, MS, Adobe, open-source projects, etc really have no idea what they are programming? Unless software dev is like an iceberg where there is much much more unseen than seen???

I don't know. I suspect most software is actually internal or proprietary. I don't think that developpers working on some custom widgets factory optimization software actually use it to optimize their mini-factory at home. Or that many developers run their own telecom on the side and need all kinds of software to route calls. Same is probably true of FAANG developpers too: how many adwords engineers actually run their own advertising campaign? Or have a personal need to store massive amounts of data in their own bigtable?

This is not always possible.

At my first job I built a system to track charitable donations by local bank branches for the banks lawyers. I couldn't even understand most of the status drop downs I built as they were just line numbers in IRS forms (eg 1040 13b). The PM on the project was barely doing any better.

But when we were done the lawyers all agreed that it was 1000 times better than the Excel spreadsheet that the lawyers themselves had built and were passing around between offices.

Would it have turned out better if I'd been a tax attorney before taking on the gig, I'm sure. But you can still get results without the deep domain knowledge residing in the programmer's head.

At my first job we built a .Net application for a client. There where some pretty detailed specification regarding how the thing was suppose to work, but not what it was actually used for.

We had an extremely happy client, who used this thing extensively in his own consulting business. None of the developers could tell you how the software was to be used, beyond: “It stores data in a tree like structure with three node types”.

Well, perhaps he is not a "good" product :) Seriously though I'm wondering which ads would target him...

None probably reach him, since he likely runs blockers.

All his ads are Halloween costumes of Data from Star Trek.

This would actually be a good move if they were willing to accept that their reputation has taken a huge hit and they need to take measures to restore trust.

I doubt they would do that and try for the trusted plan of legal warfare and whataboutism.

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