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Mafia Wars CEO Brags About Scamming Users
jamie writes with a follow-up to our recent discussion of social gaming scams:
"Mark Pincus, CEO of the company that brought us Mafia Wars, says: 'I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues right away. I mean, we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar, which was like, I don't know... I downloaded it once and couldn't get rid of it.'"
TechCrunch also ran a interesting tell-all from the CEO of a company specializing in Facebook advertisements, who provided some details on similarly shady operations at the popular social networking site.
Anything that exposes additional personal information on us to the web is bad IMO. All personal info, should be OFF by default anything less is unacceptable. If I choose to click a box and expose personal info, it should only be by my choice, not to agree to a TOS.
The guy even admits that the polls were BS, just collecting a user's personal information for selling to advertisers to generate revenue.
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... anyone using Facebook, that is. It's a pit of shady applications. Not even the nice applications are not annoying in some aspect. You can't even take a quiz there without having it try force itself onto others. Sometimes trying to fool you into thinking that the only way to see the results is to publish it to your friends.
There was a time when we couldn't dream of malicious quizzes, and infesting horoscopes, but Facebook brings the necessary application intelligence to us. In a bad way. Their application API must be like a spammer's wet dream.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
My biggest problem with FB applications is the absurd policy about what rights do the applications have. Either you give them no rights at all (and can't use it) or you give them full access to all your and your friends' info. You can then go to settings and stop the application from posting to your wall, etc... But it has access to all the information you have access to.
There are occasionally rather interesting looking small games, quizes, etc. that I would want to try out... But I don't want to give them full access to all my information! Those quizes don't need it at all, the application doesn't use any of it. Perhaps a list of friend names so it can show "Your friends got these results" but that's it.
If there only was a way to use some checkbox list "Let these access list of my friends but not their (or my) relationshipstatus, their (or my) photos, the groups they (or I) belong to..." or anything like that, I would use a lot more applications. But it is either "Tell them everything or don't use them".
"Behind every great fortune is a crime." -- Honoré de Balzac
First, maturity is realizing that not everyone who disagrees with you is a "fuckhead".
As a matter of fact, we have an extensive vocabulary to describe all these things. Try "strolling", "breathing" and "being amicable". In fact, that a concept has a simple name in all languages shows by sort of a reverse Sapir-Whorf route the universality of that concept.
Greed isn't deviant. In fact, it's rather common, and to some degree, universal. What we call "greed" is just the manifestation of game theory. Every organism acts in its own interest, or more precisely, in the interest of its genes. Organisms do this because they inherited the trait from their ancestors, who were the organisms who spread their genes best. Humans are not above mathematics. It's only natural that we act in our best interests too. But for the most part, we do so by cooperating, because they makes us all better off.
When all is well, we all get along in a state of enlightened self-interest where our self-interest and collective interest balance. But aggressive players can disrupt the game and at least temporarily benefit. Sometimes the gain really is short-term, and the society (system) settles back into a stable state. Other times, a new equilibrium is achieved. In human terms, that new equilibrium usually isn't desirable, and even the aggressors end up worse off. (To pick an example: who did the Trojan War benefit, exactly?)
If we want a stable society in which we can all accrue the maximum personal benefit, we need to push back against those who would destabilize it using short-sighted aggressive behavior. To do that, we need to institute rules that make this behavior less attractive, and we need to institute rules that make society more tolerant to the damage caused by this aggressive behavior.
"Good" and "bad" are inflammatory and irrelevant on this level. Instead, we should be talking about how to prevent society from being damaged by its most aggressive members.
There's an old adage that advises, "never try to apply a technical solution to a social problem." It's true here: there were no attacks that an encrypted connection to Facebook would have mitigated; toolbar installation was the user's choice, not some drive-by download; finally, product offers and hidden $10-per-month charges didn't even have anything to do with computing, except incidentally.
While improving technical security is worthwhile, it's not something that would have helped here. You can't solve the dancing bunny problem without preventing users from choosing what to do with their own machines. You'd have to implement draconian and pervasive DRM, and effective give people appliances when before they had general-purpose computers. That's a cure worse than the disease.
This problem is social, and needs a social solution. Legislation is how we collectively solve social problems. There's nothing inherently scary or sinister about law. It makes us civilized. Reading about the exploits of this CEO and the thousands like him, I can't help but think we need a lot more civilization right now.
Actually he is right according "The Google Story" by David A Vise. Their original plan was to licence the underlying search technology to other search companies. It was only after they were stonewalled by every other search company who wanted to be able to skew results in favour of their best customers that they released their own search engine to the masses and started moving to an advertising based model.
Even now they are very ambivalent with regard to advertising. The have the most high value piece of internet real estate in existence (http://www.google.co.uk/) and it does not contain a single advert.
I know many people here may have bought into the current MS and AT&T sponsored "Google is Evil" campaign, but lets not forget they were shunned by every other search engine of the time as they were to interested in giving their users the most relevant results, not the results that made them the most money. Until this changes it will always be my home page as I wonder whether Bing and Yahoo would go to revenue based results at the drop if a hat if Google were out of the picture.
I dont read
It's only a minority that do asshat things like supporting their kids-text addiction to the tune of thousands of bucks.
My girl (12 years old) gets 300 pesos load a month ($6 US) for her phone. That's good for 300 texts, or 10 a day. If she finishes them in a week, that's up to her, but's she's not getting any more till the next month.
But as a parent, the ability to at least call her wherever she is, if she's late home from school etc, and save myself the worry / stress / potential coronary, it's a small price to pay.
Kid's DO need cells, in the same way as kids in our day needed the latest Nikes, or a skateboard, or whatever the trend of the week was. Not just so they don't become social pariahs, but so the parents can have some peace of mind that they can be contacted in an emergency.
I've had plenty of friends who are now not currently my friends. I wouldn't tolerate a friendship with someone who behaved in such a manner, and yes I would likely go to their manager if they were doing something like this.
My friends understand that I hold this position.
I watch the backs of people who are worth it.
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