Facebook is a company that is loathed roughly in proportion to the degree that people understand what they actually do to make their money: adorn your baby or wedding photos with fart app ads, put your own face on various ads that you know nothing about, make you play whack-a-mole with their settings UI to preserve what little control of your information they allowed you to have last week, sell your instagram sexts, etc etc.
And he's the guy who calls the shots.
I fully accept that some of their users (or ex-users) do. I have seen plenty of blog posts and outraged media stories. Yet I haven't noticed any great attrition among my friends on facebook, which is what I would expect to see if people cared much about this stuff.
The guy gave 500 million dollars to improve something in this world... The way he runs his company (or as someone else in this thread said, the company "runs itself") has nothing to do with it.
Still on the Hitler topic, I don't think you could opt-out of being german, nor could you voice your opinion freely against whatever was happening without fear of the consequences.
What I think, and in this I think you agree with me, is that Facebook should be more transparent as to what is done to your data, so that people would make a conscious choice of using it or not.
So if a minority objects to facebook, I would suggest they just not use facebook. In most cases that means facebook won't have a negative impact on them.
When a child grows into a teenager it becomes harder to blame the father for their actions.
$500mil doesn't suddenly make that ok, especially considering the charity is basically a quango.
You have some serious soul-searching to do, guy. Go out there and build something, or do anything useful with your life. Then come back and tell me who you think is good or evil.
Edit: This was uncalled for, and I apologize.
What I mean to say is that anybody who builds things of value for a living quickly develops a more nuanced sense of morality than the parent displays. I do think that, when talking of the moral character of great people, the experience of having gone through the struggle yourself is rich with perspective. The fact that the parent deems Mark "clearly immoral" because Mark changed the parent's Facebook UI is absolutely the most revolting type of perspective in my eyes.
People like the parent bring out the worst in me -- people who judge others without lifting a finger. I'm not sure what I was trying to accomplish with the name-calling, though.
For ref, I don't do nothing - I do a lot of charitable work which benefits people directly (children with neurological problems). No stock, no schemes (other than gift aid). I won't go into the amount in detail but per year for the last year it's been larger than zuck's donation aggregated per Facebook staff member
I'm entitled to judge a person by their own standards - in public, in front of people, which is how zuck wants us to live our social life.
I'll have done net more positive things by sitting on my arse doing nothing, which I haven't been.
If you equate "enabled people to share more of their lives more broadly" with "damaged people's privacy" then I agree, but I'm not sure even a majority would agree with a sentiment of that necessarily being a bad thing. People share what they feel comfortable with, don't they?
To whom is hard to control and is made harder on purpose as after all, their entire model is based on encouraging sharing legitimately or otherwise.
Don't underestimate the power of the majority to make a crap decision. That's why we have privacy and data protection laws in the EU: to protect people from predatory information gathering and sharing.
== Why? Can you explain?
How is this not a PR exercise: Oopps. Here's $500MM.
While I don't think its a one sided discussion, its certainly open for debate if you are looking at the maths.