Facebook More Hated Than Banks, Utilities

jfruhlinger writes "According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Facebook raises a lot of ire among its customers — more than Bank of America or AT&T Mobility. This bodes ill for the company — as blogger Chris Nerney points out, many of the others on the most-hated list are utilities and other companies with monopolies, which can hold customers despite bad service. At least Facebook edged out MySpace." Unsurprisingly, the most important thing about Google+ is that it's not Facebook.

Comments

Never underestimate

[chemicaldave]

Never underestimate the ability of people to hate something that didn't exist a few years ago and they get for free.

Re:Never underestimate

[Sez Zero]

I don't pay money for Facebook, but it is certainly not free.

Re:Never underestimate

[timeOday]

I'm not even on Facebook and I hate it, because everybody stopped sending personal emails. Everything is getting too centralized.

Re:Never underestimate

[TheLink]

You're probably not Facebook's customer either.

You're what Facebook sells to their customers.

Re:Never underestimate

[antifoidulus]

See, there is a huge difference between AT&T et al. and Facebook, namely that with AT&T, you have to enter into a deal with them, they cannot just put you on their network without your consent. Now you may have gripes with the service you get after you get on their networks, but at the end of the day it is something you consented to. Facebook on the other hand has the potential to draw you into things you never consented to. For instance get tagged in a picture that you would rather not be tagged in? Tough shit, deal with it. The list goes on. So yeah, you can hate something you got for free, esp. when you didn't want it in the first place.

Re:Never underestimate

[Samantha Wright]

Some or all of your eternal soul. Also your... inalienable right to non-targeted advertising, I guess.

The privacy-drain of the internet has turned you into a husk of a human being unable to escape your own vices! You can do nothing but buy, buy, buy because all of the advertisements around you contain nothing but exactly what you want and/or need! You're nothing but a slave to your impulses now, controlled by your corporate masters! What has mankind done to the world of the future?

Frankly, I think services paid for by marketing research are probably on the losing end in the long run. Product placements can only get so subtle... and as they do, we're getting more adept at catching them and ignoring them. Viva la AdBlock.

Also, there's a chance that your mother's maiden name and/or credit card information could be leaked to someone unscrupulous in a developing country.

Re:Never underestimate

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one reason why I was disappointed that Google Wave didn't work out--it would be nice to move to something that is an open protocol, like email, rss, etc. that can be decentralized and hosted across different sites.

Really, I feel like things are rarely new, just sort of polished up. IRC, html, newsgroups, email--most people could use these standards for whatever they want and wouldn't notice any difference in their lives.

I'm not saying nothing is new, or that new communication methods shouldn't be developed--I would love them to--but I wish there was more focus on making them open and decentralized, and asking whether they're really adding something or not.

There's ton of room for a social network protocol; I would just like to see it be something distributed.

Re:Never underestimate

[Opportunist]

They have customers, but it's not their users. They're the product. Yes, dear user of Facebook, you're not their "valued customer". You are what they are selling. You are the product. You are a bit like the native Americans when the white people came. Ignorant of what this "trade" really means, what it really means that you hand over your private space for a few trinkets. Your data is valuable, but you hand it over for a few shiny beads.

But hey, don't feel bad. Facebook ain't the only one. It's about the same with private TV. You, watching it, aren't their customer. You're their product. They're selling you to the ad companies. So it's not like Facebook is the first "evil" company to exploit that people attach little value to their time and data, they just took it to a new level.

More importantly it is better

[Giant Electronic Bra]

That's the real significant fact about it. Facebook's UI is a gargantuan POS. G+ has a vastly better UI and functionality that is clearly more useful for what it is intended to do. I don't understand what it is about sites like Facebook, but these services just seem to be incapable of not turning themselves into crap. Hopefully G+ will just stick to doing what it does now and doing it better. I don't understand why I should need to be able to run 'applications' in a social networking site, I can go to Popcap and do that if I want, etc.

So yeah, G+ isn't Facebook, and that's a good thing.

But it's still Google...

[eln]

It may not be Facebook, but it's still Google, and Google is still a company whose entire business model revolves around mining user data and using it to sell advertising. Google also shares Facebook's general disdain for privacy.

As long as we depend on single monolithic sites run by for-profit entities for social networking, we'll continue to have the same problems we do with Facebook. The whole social networking model is based around providing the service for free while making money from targeted advertising. As long as that's the case, the companies running the social networks will do whatever they can to try and entice people to reveal more information about themselves. Switching from Facebook to Google isn't going to change that.

Dont use it then.

[drolli]

I always wonder about the people who hate something, and despite quite some competition, continue to use it. Do your friends really stop talking to you if you leave facebook? Then look for other friends.

G+ isn't Facebook, so what?

[dkleinsc]

The big draw of Facebook in its early years was "It's not MySpace". What makes anybody think that the story of G+ is going to be any different than the story of MySpace and Facebook?

Your data.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're paying by your personal data, which are then made available to FB's customers (e.g. advertisers). Also, FB can use anything you upload there as it sees fit ("irrevocable license blah blah blah"). Go read their ToS, you may be *slightly* surprised what you're giving them - it's certainly not free, not even as in beer.

Re:Your data.

[wasabii]

My personal data isn't worth a dime to me. It's data. It's not like an investment. So, yes, it's still free, and did not cost me a dime.

Re:Your data.

[bsane]

Can you send me: current employer, your residences for the last 10 years, your home and/or cell number, all currently used email addresses (plus password! the FB special), photos of you and friends, vacation schedule, where you like to eat/shop, your sexual preferences and anything else I missed... Thanks!

Re:Your data.

[morethanapapercert]

Oh I do understand that, but what I also understand, all too keenly, is that it doesn't matter if I avoid a site like Facebook, the realities of data mining mean that I don't have to even be a member for unscrupulous third parties to discover a lot of things about me through the applications my friends and family who *do* belong to the site install on their profiles.

One easy example is in tagging photos, indicating that I am in them. I have no problem with my friends having a picture of me enjoying a cold one at a birthday party, after all, they were at the same party, engaged in similar activities and so they are aware of the context in which that photo was taken. However, unbeknownst to most of my friends, by default most of the applications they install (Mafia Wars, Farmville etc) have total access to that information as well. The developers then harvest whatever information that has marketable value. I can easily foresee a company that offers background checks on prospective employees that, among other things, searches for photos with my name attached to them as a tag. They can then say "we found X number of pictures of Mr Example in which drugs or alcohol were being consumed" and there go my prospects of being hired.

Note that I don't have to be actually the one consuming those products, just to appear in the pictures to be labelled as a potential alcoholic or drug user. And this could easily happen completely unknown to me, whether I belong to the site or not. And because neither I nor my friend have any good way of knowing which application developer harvested what information and in turn sold it, we have no good way of suing such a background checker if they provide false or misleading data to my prospective employer.

Sure, I gave that information to my friend freely and he in turn freely gave it to Facebook (as per the TOS), my problem is that sites like Facebook make it as easy as possible to be unaware of this covert data gathering and then make it hard as possible to defend against if/when you do become concerned about it.

As far as I am concerned, no matter what the fine print actually says, sites like Facebook knowingly use misdirection and outright deception to cultivate ignorance on the part of it's members and then make millions exploiting the ignorance they created.

Re:I need circles indeed.

[Grizzley9]

I don't understand your post. FB does indeed have these groups. You can setup individual groups and add who you want to them just like "Circles" in Google+. Then when posting you can simply select the lock icon drop arrow and only post to that group (so they can see) or post so only they can't see. What Google+ has done is to just make that selection the default instead of an option. It is an improvement sure, but FB still has it readily and easily available with the same effort that Google+ has. G+ just has the greener pastures going for it right now (Sparks and Hangouts don't seem enough to pull people from FB).

Re:There's a difference...

[morethanapapercert]

On the other hand, if your mother opens an account with $BIGBANK, then that bank only has access to the personally identifying information she provides to them, there are some laws in place to control exactly what information the bank is allowed to ask for and exactly how they are supposed to handle it. That bank also would exactly ZERO information about you. By comparison, Facebook makes it incredibly easy to submit far more information than simply name, age and physical address, not only about the user in question, but many of his friends and family. Your mother could add your name to a genealogy app, combined with the fact that she publicly mentions that she has a inherited disease and now it's possible to discover that you are at risk for that same condition, even though you never even joined the site.

On top of that, the information a bank knows about you is, by default, private Your neighbour cannot get your banking information from $BIGBANK without a court order or a certified letter stating that he is now the executor of your estate. Facebook is, and always has been, by default as public as possible. By default, almost every app someone installs has access to all the information found in their profile and the profiles of their friends. Facebook makes it very easy for it's users to remain unaware that their privacy is subject to the decisions made by their friends.

Re:And...

[ianare]

MS has repeatedly shown that they can not be trusted, more to the point was the backroom deals they made with hardware manufacturers. And though Google doesn't have as nearly as bad a track record, the Law (US & EU) is beginning to take notice of them specifically for anti-competitive behavior. But don't take my word for it, ask them yourself ;-)