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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!
This is just a business man summing up to the obvious things that run this sort of business. If you don't control your product to maximize revenues, you are decreasing your wealth.
A friend of mine wrote a program which installed on the users computer even when you clicked "No" on the do you wish to install this application in Internet Explorer. This was to reconnect the users modem to a modempool his boss had which was very hard to get rid off, because he wrote it very viral like. Remove one or 2-3 parts and suddenly you had it again.
When I spoke to his boss about this and other stuff he had on their rippoff of the hotornot site he just shrugged and said it's in a gray area and not illegal yet so I don't care.
People like this will always be out there and they don't care how they make money or who gets hurt as long as they have a nice income.
... when people feel they need to get rich. This guy phrases it as 'controlling his destiny' to get profits as soon as possible, which IMHO reeks of addiction to money. And lets face it, some of the really rich people who control or own more or less reputable companies now have probably done some pretty shady things in the beginning of their career just to get to that point. Some probably just get there by chance, because they happen to have a talent that more or less by coincidence generates money, but some start with a real _need_ for money and power, which is a good incentive to not be too picky about morals and ethics. Thinks about real estate e.g., where lots of people are speculating hoping to get rich and ruthlessness can give you a real advantage.
I read about a research a while ago (years, sorry no source) that states that acquiring large sums of money creates the same kind of euphoria as for instance using cocaine as it causes the same neurotransmitters to be produced in the brain. Irrational need for more and more money is a real addiction I think and should be treated as such.
The only remarkable thing this guys is doing is being open and forward about it.
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"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Bad thieves and scammers steal and scam, and get squashed.
Meh thieves and scammers steal and scam, and brag about it.
Great thieves and scammers steal and scam, and get public funding as well as election votes.
Why getting mad at this guy, while great scammers run the world?
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Didn't Google's first plan to make money, selling search engines, fail rather badly? They only came up with their wildly succesful business model based on advertising after the first one failed. Note they still do sell search appliances, but it is a tiny percentage of their revenue.
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
Whenever corporate mismanagement causes some calamity, people invariably decry the people responsible as "greedy bastards", "short-sighted morons", and so on. Although these statements are true, stating them is useless: greed, as a part of human nature, is here to stay. And organizations invariably elevate their most greedy and ambitious members because these are people are the ones who will exploit the rules to their advantage. Thus, given that greedy people will inevitably be in positions of power, we need to construct rules which ensure that this greed doesn't harm society. These rules need to make it the greedy party's interest to be a good participant in society.
We seem to ignore this principle. Over and over again, we fume and demand that companies and individuals be more responsible and respectful. Yet hardly anyone talks about implementing rules that would actually limit the damage.
A huge number of people believe that if society were just free of constraints, it'd organize itself into an efficient, elegant system and solve all our problems. That's wishful thinking. Greedy people will take advantage of inside connections, of special knowledge, and of outright dishonesty to screw over everyone else. And as much as we'd like to believe that the screwed will respond by researching their own information and leveling the playing field, doesn't actually happen, and won't.
First of all, even if everyone were equally capable, the screwing party has more time to research a particular type of transaction than the screwed party, so the asymmetry is really built-in. Second, not everyone is equally capable. As Larry Summers famously wrote, "There are idiots. Look around." Sometimes people can't help being idiots. Does that mean they deserve to be exploited? How far does that extend? Do people deserve to be exploited because they haven't studied browser security, or because they're not privy to office gossip, or because they don't have the social skills to network their way out of sticky situations?
We're going to keep seeing "X screwed over by powerful greedy person Y" stories until we use political channels to create new regulations that makes it in the best interests of the greedy to play nice with society. We can talk about the form these regulations should take. (IMHO, I think it's pretty clear we need far stronger privacy laws in the US.) What won't work is complaining that corporations are greedy. What won't work is trying to make laws while under the delusion that everyone is a rational actor with full access to relevant information. What might work is a determined effort to restore a sense of fair play and balance to our laws and institutions.
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tl;dr: greed is a fact of life, and crying about it won't do any good. We need effective and strong regulation to prevent the greed that invariably appears from hurting the rest of us.
Mafia Wars is free. You never have to install anything, spend any money, or visit any other sites. If you want some of the special tokens, you can do those things... But the tokens will only get you things that you could get anyway if you simply had some patience.
All of this is completely in the users' hands. The sponsors page even says things like 'don't sign up for this if you don't really want information on the product' and things like that. If you don't really -want- the Zwinkie toolbar, you shouldn't install it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Considering Zynga shamelessly rips off the games of others (go look at FarmTown, released ~6 months before FarmVille), that he'd be ok with scamming people is not shocking.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
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
If you are using Firefox, Safari, Opera or Chrome, get Greasemonkey and install the Facebook Purity script (http://steeev.freehostia.com/wp/2009/03/19/facebook_purity_cleans_up_the_facebook_homepage/).
It blocks Mafia Wars, Farmville, quizzes and more. Basically you just see stuff your friends actually write.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
So most of these scam networks block Northern California, to prevent Facebook HQ from seeing them? So that's why I don't see them. I'm a few miles from Facebook HQ. I've completely missed this phenomenon.
I'd applied SiteTruth to Google ads, trying to warn users about the "bottom feeders" with no identifiable legitimate business behind the ad. Myspace is mostly Google ads, so that's covered. Google ads in general are about 35% "bottom feeders" (we track this), but on Myspace, the percentage is much higher. From the article, Facebook has a similar problem, but it's mostly in the form of Facebook-specific ads, games, etc. We're not catching those.
Maybe it's time to do that.