4 ms·
Can Facebook legitimately pivot into any other service/product and still make money? It seems like they're always going to be at odds with privacy/public trust.
by passivate 6y ago
Can Facebook legitimately pivot into any other service/product and still make money? It seems like they're always going to be at odds with privacy/public trust.
One one hand, it is extremely sad to see talented engineers at Google/FB work hard on products designed to spy on people, but OTOH, I suppose it could be far worse if these were companies who simply sold our data.
- awestley 6y agoWould it be worse? A big part of what companies like FB and Google do is get people "hooked" (A good book on this very topic) on sharing that data. In effect willingly revealing more and more data about themselves. If it were simply being sold I don't think people would divulge as much information.
- rcoveson 6y agoAgreed. If entity A makes billions of dollars by selling everything they know about you, and entity B makes billions of dollars by merely knowing everything they know about you, I much prefer entity A. Entity B and its investors terrify me with the confidence they have in the future returns on that knowledge.
- aardvarkr 6y agoSo you’d rather me be able to purchase information about everything you’ve done, down to your gps location from five minutes ago? Even “anonymized” data is trivially easy to de-anonymize with publicly available information. It makes me shudder to think how many apps (like weather channel) are on everyone’s phones that allow companies to sell your current location to the highest bidder. It’s shockingly pervasive.
- rcoveson 6y agoIf you can purchase it then so can I, so yes, I would absolutely prefer that. Better than Facebook building up a totally proprietary information hoard. If Facebook knows it, I consider it lost anyway.
- stevehawk 6y agoas a ~40yr old it feels like the greatest disappointment of my generation is that most of our brain power went towards making better spyware, click tracking, etc, all in the name of maximizing ad revenue and click through.
- Gibbon1 6y agoWent from designing stupid stuff like cheap audio IC's which meant any teenager with a part time job could afford a bitchin stereo. To designing cool stuff like a wiget that disables a single mother's car when she's a day late on her car payment!!!
- exporectomy 6y agoYou say that car thing like it's bad. Instant enforcement of debt is good for both the lender and borrower. It stops people getting trapped deeper and deeper in debt. A lot like pre-pay phone/power/etc. Your life isn't ruined because you stopped paying, just inconvenienced for a few days.
- heavyset_go 6y agoWho is the employer so I can avoid working for, or doing business, with them?
- passivate 6y agoI think there are several parallels in other industries - financial, pharma, etc. Very smart people, working on products that are (on some axis) detrimental to our society (or at-least one vision of what a society should look like).
- theropost 6y agoQuite true, it is their business model. There are so many talented engineers using their great talent on ways to gather advertising data. I wonder what will happen when their business model is no longer viable? Do they then begin the pivot of selling our data to anyone?
- cglong 6y agoThe Facebook Portal seemed like an attempt to make a product less dependent on ad revenue; unfortunately, the fundamental nature of it made people really distrustful of it. This is also why I'm closely watching what they do with Oculus.