> Facebook, the greatest startup success story of this era, isn’t a merry band of hackers building cutesy tools that allow you to digitally Poke your friends.

> Facebook, the greatest startup success story of this era, isn’t a merry band of hackers building cutesy tools that allow you to digitally Poke your friends. This is kind of how I feel. Both about Google and Facebook - on one hand they are large companies, Google for example lobby the government [1] more than Verizon, Shell or say Goldman and somehow the irrational part of my brain is still telling me "Oh but they are just the cutesy little startup with colorful letters and a nice search feature and their motto says they are not evil and such". For many people especially in some countries being on the internet is effectively being on Facebook. I like how India fought back against Facebook's "free internet". There was a collective push-back. There should be a similar one against Google and others. These companies are holding more information about people than any state security service out there. It's not just people who volunteered the info (even then sadly Zuckerberg called them Dumb Fucks, a "thank you" would have be nicer I'd think...[2]), I for one never signed up for Facebook, but I have no doubt they know who I am and have a profile on me. How is Facebook going to use that info? What if some repressive government wants it and subpoenas Facebook to give it to them or they simply get hacked like Equifax. People should at least be afraid of them more than they are afraid of the bankers and the oil or tobacco executives like the article alludes to at the end. [1] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientagns.php?id=D000067823&year=2017 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientagns.php?id=D0000678... [2] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg