Why No One Trusts Facebook To Power the Future

redletterdave (2493036) writes "Facebook owns virtually all the aspects of the social experience—photos (Instagram), status updates (Facebook), location services (Places)—but now, Facebook is transitioning from a simple social network to a full-fledged technology company that rivals Google, moonshot for moonshot. Yet, it's Facebook's corporate control of traffic that leads many to distrust the company. In a sense, people are stuck. When the time comes for someone to abandon Facebook, whether over privacy concerns or frustration with the company, Facebook intentionally makes it hard to leave. Even if you delete your account, your ghost remains—even when you die, Facebook can still make money off you. And that's not behavior fit for a company that's poised to take over the future."

Comments

Because you think Google is any better?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

How quaint...

Re:Because you think Google is any better?

[geekmux]

How quaint...

Settling for the lesser of two evils is not only a false defense, but a mindset of the enslaved.

And ironically, replace "Facebook" with "Hollywood" in the summary above. When I read about profiting after you die, the first thing I thought of were celebrities. Death is not a guarantee of limited revenue. And because of narcissism within social media, everyone is in fact a celebrity now. At least according to Facebook who want to immortalize you forever within their revenue engine.

Re:Because you think Google is any better?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Realistically, Google wasn't founded by a guy who stole passwords to read other people's email.

Google may have been founded by people with the best of intentions, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Google believes in a panopticon world in which anonymity and the right to privacy has disappeared. They may believe it's for my own good, but their dream world is my nightmare.

Re:Because you think Google is any better?

[mark-t]

It could be a coincidence, but as your story leaves the name of what you googled conspicuously absent, you've conveniently made it impractical for anyone to even attempt to prove or disprove a causative factor in this regard. This tactic is a staple used by conspiracy theorists everywhere and is often indicative of something that isn't logically sustainable from an objective standpoint if all the facts were actually revealed.

Re:Because you think Google is any better?

[bmo]

Oh look a "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about"

Show me your tax return.
Tell me where you live.
Tell me the names of your children.

--
BMO

Re:Because you think Google is any better?

[Samantha Wright]

Facebook's position on providing large amounts of user data to its business partners has been the subject of scrutiny a few times. It remains unclear exactly how much stuff developers like Zynga have been able to access. There was also a series of events a couple of years ago where privacy controls were updated and set to overly permissive defaults—which is either spectacularly bad management (given how much bad PR it generated each and every time) or a bribed enablement of data-scraping.

As for sending email to a Gmail user, that's what I meant by "passive" use of Google's services, although I should note that if your e-mail never gets read, it cannot make Google money, just like a site with Google ads on it that never gets visited. You're really only an incidental bystander in that situation.

Re:Because you think Google is any better?

[Spykk]

Why would you suspect Google? A more probable explanation would be you visited sites affiliated with the manufacturers of said plastic looking for information about it from your work connection. They saw your domain name accessing their site, looked you up on the corporate web page and sent you an offer.

Re:Because you think Google is any better?

[ultranova]

Why a lack of anonymity is a nightmare to you? Is it because you don't live in a free country and the only way you can express your ideas without going to jail afterward is with anonymity?

In no country can you express any actually significant idea without making enemies. Powers that be want nothing so much as status quo, since that means they stay on top, and any significant idea by definition threatens it. Anonymity is absolutely vital for any society, since it allows unpleasant truths to be expressed without fear of legal or extralegal punishment, whether it comes in the form of jail, vigilantes or unemployment.

Furthermore, as Manning and Snowden showed, even nominally free countries tend to have boils of corruption which need to be exposed to be healed - and we can't rely on always having a hero ready when we need one, thus such exposition needs to be possible anonymously.

And of course there's the "knowledge is power" -aspect, where the state being able to casually record everything its citizens do online (and increasingly offline) simply makes it too powerful to resist the temptation to abuse said power.

That's a bit of a stretch

[damn_registrars]

a company that's poised to take over the future.

Facebook has no future. Their business plan is to continue to get people to come and give up their personal information for free, and then sell that information for profit to everyone else they can think of. The well is already starting to dry up on that. Unless you expect the world to end in the next 5 years, saying that facebook will take over the future is ridiculous.

Who?

[ArcadeMan]

Facebook owns virtually all the aspects of the social experience—photos (Instagram), status updates (Facebook), location services (Places).

That's funny, I don't use any of these services, yet I have a very social Web experience. I hang in places where people with the same hobbies hang out and it's great. It's called forums.

Re:The Social Experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or even on the internet. People can and do be social on the internet without putting Facebook in the middle. They share photos, exchange emails, tell their friends about their new dog or latest breakup all without FB being involved... as astonishing as that seems.

Facebook is for idiots. Always has been. It's the AOL of the modern internet, and as such, it is fine that it keeps existing, because it keeps the idiots occupied and away from the rest of the interwebs.

Don't assume that Facebook is forever

[joeflies]

As myspace proved out, the social market is incredibly fickle. Facebook's billboard model is only part of the market, and there are already signs that communication is shifting towards real time. That market isn't so clear, with plenty of fragmentation across LINE, the weibos in asia and facebook's relatively poor sticker offering trying to catch up. WeChat may have been pricey, but a necessary addition to admit they missed the boat on this angle.

Re:nonsense

[Jack Griffin]

IAll these things, btw, I can do with Google+, but Google was late in the social media space, so I prefer FB since pretty much everybody that I know is already there.

That and the fact that G+ sucks arse. If G+ was exactly like Facebook, then Facebook would already be dead. Instead Google ran their nerd wand over it and made a complete mess of an interface that no-one can figure out what is going on. I prefer FB because the interface makes sense, and both my children and parents can use it without asking for help. G+ fails that test miserably.