As the popular quip on HN goes, 'The majority of mobile web tech fortunes have been built on avoiding the costs of consequences and regulation, while retaining

As the popular quip on HN goes, 'The majority of mobile web tech fortunes have been built on avoiding the costs of consequences and regulation, while retaining all the profits.' > when what‘s good for the individual may not be good for the public as a whole Is as good a summary of what Facebook has done wrong as anything I've read. The problem is not that Facebook and its ilk are inherently evil, but that they seem willfully ignorant. Ignorant that past a certain scale they have an obligation to the public: an obligation very different from the laissez-faire world The Facebook started in. The internet majors seem to be gradually awakening to this, but I'd argue that only Apple (with their stance on privacy) and Google (with their internal privacy counterparties) really grok the change. And to be fair, both have business models that can tolerate having principles. When you've got a recommendation algorithm that could push someone to suicide or change an election outcome, you have a responsibility to optimize for more than corporate profit.