Facebook has to stay on top of competitors like WhatsApp and Instagram, which they ended up buying, and now they’re worried about competing with services like V

Facebook has to stay on top of competitors like WhatsApp and Instagram, which they ended up buying, and now they’re worried about competing with services like Venmo. They have to or they’ll lose marketshare. Although the market mechanism usually creates the right incentives for companies to act in their customers’ interest this could be a new type of market failure. Imposing a cost on customers that wasn’t agreed upon by reducing the cost of surveillance for hackers and governments. The "cost" is lower because the information is already collected and just needs to be obtained. So how can we fix that? Putting the data in the hands of government, where it’s probably more likely to be stolen? I assume that facebook has better cyber security than any government agency and a better incentive to keep their customers’ data secure. Or maybe breaking facebook up into multiple companies in an anti-trust litigation that will take a decade to settle? I might end up sounding like a blockchain proponent here. To be honest I think that most blockchain applications are scams or an overly complicated solution where an old fashioned data base would be totally sufficient. I actually think that blockchain technology has a very big draw back, because ownership is an important part of markets and creating the right incentives for companies. I’m very convinced that the majority of people who are working on some blockchain project don’t have a clue about what they’re talking about. I can’t claim to really understand blockchain in every detail either. My credentials are that I studied undergrad economics at Columbia and helped found a bitcoin exchange software company in 2013 and worked there until last year. So from an economics point of view, my guess is that blockchain, despite the drawback of eliminating ownership, could be a solution to this specific type of market failure. Here's a video that explores the trade off between ownership and censorship resistance in a bit more detail: https://youtu.be/pHOYORGZrps https://youtu.be/pHOYORGZrps