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?

[Samantha Wright]

Well, there's at least one sentence that's essentially different: "even when you die, Facebook can still make money off you."

Google doesn't (as far as I know) sell user information to advertisers. They exclusively use their own analytics; all an advertiser can do is submit their target demographics and keywords, and let Google do the math. While they're both huge storehouses of personal information, the big G is monolithic and generally non-porous—unless you're a malignant security agency, at least. If you're not using their services (at least passively), you're definitely not making them money.

This doesn't make them Totally Cool Groovy Guys You Should Trust With Anything, but it does make them naive ideologues surfing along the edge of a slippery slope rather than the outright thuggery of Facebook and other traditional advertisers—FB is more like a spam subscription; once you get signed up, you can be certain that your private information will propagate across the cosmos for eternity.

Re:Because you think Google is any better?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Google doesn't (as far as I know) sell user information to advertisers

If you really believe this, I'll tell you a little story:

A few years ago, I was working for a manufacturer in R+D, developing an accessory for one of our products. One of the parts of that accessory required a plastic part with very specific features (it was a living hinge, but with certain requirements that made polypropylene unsuitable).

I used Google to find out what other types of plastics might be suitable, and quickly finally found a material that would work. A rather obscure, rather expensive plastic with a barbaric name. I Googled some more about that plastic, then called it a day and went home.

The VERY NEXT DAY, I got a spam in my work mailbox from a Chinese manufacturer of that very plastic, offering me prices by the ton.

I had never heard of that plastic before Googling it.

Coincidence?

Re:Because you think Google is any better?

[phantomfive]

Realistically, Google wasn't founded by a guy who stole passwords to read other people's email. It wasn't founded by a guy who told some people he would build their idea, then went around and built it for himself, lying to them to the last possible minute. Facebook was founded by, and is still run by that guy. Furthermore there is no reason to believe he's changed.

Google at least attempts to be non-evil, and have sacrificed profit for their principles. People who are upset with them mainly disagree that collecting personal information for the purpose of custom-tailored ad-serving is evil, but that's controversial (really, people who do it feel they are helping users). My primary complaints with Google is that they have too many bugs in their software and don't support backwards compatibility, but that's off-topic.

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?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Cookies are disabled on all my browsers, except on certain whitelisted sites I trust, and Google sites aren't on it.

Also, I got a spam mail, not an ad on a webpage.

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?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Saying there is no conspiracy involved generally leads people to believe there is one.

Aaw man, I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't aren't I? :)

Okay look, Google is a company that scares the bejesus out of me, and I believe the things they develop and invest in lead the world to a dangerously slippery slope. I also think they don't publicize all the things they do because they believe people aren't ready to hear what they have in store for them. But I *emphatically* don't believe there is ANY conspiracy involved.

Re:Because you think Google is any better?

[labnet]

Which is why we need a pure peer to peer social messaging system. Call it torrents for facebook. There is no reason for centralisation of social data. Features like
- meta data and messaging data is spread around different peers as encrypted chunks so it can be rebuit on any new device you sign up to.
- grouping like google circles.
- expiry option on messages and images.

Perhaps there is already someone doing this?

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?

[slimjim8094]

Why would Google sell that info? They make so much more by selling access to it.

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?

[Jack Griffin]

I'd mod you up but feel the need to contribute to this topic. Where are the Facebook competitors? Everyone uses Facebook while also bitching and moaning about the lack of control and privacy, you would think the market is ripe for take over by an ethical/open competitor so where is it? All you need is the friends/status update/post pictures/IM platform along with some form of ownership and freedom from ads and you'd be set. For revenue I think the world is ready to pay for what they get model (free is not as appealing as it once was now everything is loaded with ads), so I'd try for a micro subscription model like Whatsapp, say $5/year. If the App was solid, and you threw a few hundred million marketing the benefits of Social Media 2.0 with privacy, ownership and control of your own data I can't see why Facebook can't be overthrown. There is certainly demand for it, and a huge slice of market share just waiting to be taken.

Re:Because you think Google is any better?

[Teckla]

Your seething hated of Google is noted. And noted. And noted...

This article is about Facebook. Quit trying to change the subject.

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.

Re:That's a bit of a stretch

[geekmux]

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.

You're more fucking delusional than Tinkerbell on acid if you think for one second an entire generation is going to step away from the "Free" button when paying for anything online.

Seriously, I can't stop laughing over the absurdity of this...this brings ignorance to a whole new level.

And you might want to trace the money and ownership of most of the shit you use online before making claims as to where monopolies exist and where they do not.

Re:That's a bit of a stretch

[TheRaven64]

The stock price has dropped quite a bit in the last few days, but it's still above the average for the last year and a lot higher than it was this time last year. It's hard to draw intelligent conclusions from the Facebook stock price, it's better to use it as a source of entropy for your random number generator...

Re:That's a bit of a stretch

[VortexCortex]

You're more fucking delusional than Tinkerbell on acid if you think for one second an entire generation is going to step away from the "Free" button when paying for anything online.

Geocities.

Seriously, I can't stop laughing over the absurdity of this...this brings ignorance to a whole new level.

Friendster.

And you might want to trace the money and ownership of most of the shit you use online before making claims as to where monopolies exist and where they do not.

MySpace.

Trying to leave facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the social backlash you could face when all of your Facebook 'friends' discover that you are no longer on their friend list. I think that is the biggest reason why it is so persistent and why it is so hard to leave even when one wants to ditch the social networking super giant.

I feel the only way people will be able to start leaving the network without fear of social backlash is when there is an 'organic' event where everyone you know is leaving for possibly the next best thing at which time you feel ok to disengage with Facebook because everyone else you know is doing it.

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:Who?

[antdude]

And newsgroups, IRC, etc. :P

Getting blocked?

[Mr2cents]

I've been pondering on how toget rid of my facebook account. Is it possible to get your account suspended by posting filth and other matirial that's against their terms of use? I've heard about people getting their account blocked. Instead of panicking over it, I want to embrace it. Good idea?

Re:Getting blocked?

[Chris Mattern]

Your account may be blocked, but your info on Facebook servers? That's forever. Every day I'm more and more glad that I have never had an account, and never will.

Re:Getting blocked?

[RoknrolZombie]

The sooner the better?

Yes, as everyone says, the "information is forever"...whatever. I've been on the internet since roughly 1998, and it's relatively challenging to find information on me from that far back. Plus - what benefit would it serve?

As long as you are still on FB, they are getting current information to sell to the highest bidder. Next week that information won't be as relevant. Next month, even less so. In five years? Who in the hell is going to give a shit what you were doing five years ago?

Of course - there are other things you can do to help reduce the BS...change email addresses/ip addresses/phone numbers...move...the usual things you have to do to get rid of a stalker. Fortunately, in a planet of roughly 6 billion idiots (giving some leeway for people who aren't idiots or don't use the neterwebz), when you walk away they just don't care. At least, not right now. Not really. But later? When people finally start realizing what it is they're giving up? Yeah...then they'll be chasing users, and you'll probably be enjoying it a lot less.

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.

Had no choice but to deinstall it

[m.dillon]

I had no choice but to deinstall it on all of my Android devices. The old version no longer works and the new one wants permission to access pretty much everything I own... all my contacts, all my accounts, location, phone numbers, make phone calls and texts, god knows what else. Everything.

It's insane. I will not give Facebook access to all of that stuff. They can go stuff it. Nor will I give third party sites FB access for validation since that also means they can snarf my friends list.

I'm still able to run the FB app on IOS because that at least allows me to deny FB permission the access. Android though is out of the question.

-Matt

But they can't build anything

[Animats]

Neither Google nor Facebook has ever successfully built a product users will actually pay for. (Google's Nexus phones are rebranded LG, Samsung, and Asus products). For both, all significant revenue is from ads. Yet both have now acquired hardware companies. Now they have to make a business out of them. They may not succeed.

Google acquired Motorola and had no idea what to do with it. Now they're selling it. Google has an automatic driving R&D project, but they acquired DARPA Grand Challenge technology and seem no closer to deployment than a few years ago. Google acquired a half dozen advanced robotics R&D firms, but none of those have commercial products or profits yet. Google now has to build an entire industrial business in robotics, which is slow, hard, and will take years to pay off. Google hasn't shown the corporate patience for that. Google products that didn't take off quickly are usually killed. I'm worried that Google will end up trashing the US robotics industry once they realize it's not a Make Money Fast business.

Facebook hasn't really tried yet in hardware. But they have no expertise at it. The Oculus Rift is still a prototype/low volume device. Facebook has never run a factory. They'll have to outsource manufacturing, which means everybody else will be making goggles if it turns out to be profitable to do so.

Zukerburg didn't lie...

[Stumbles]

in an email interview years ago when asked about security, data privacy and such things. He said anyone is a fucking idiot to trust him; indeed you are.

Yes, because it is

[brunes69]

- Google lets you export ALL OF YOUR DATA, 100%, in full, in open formats.

- Google lets you close your account and delete it, leaving no traces. This includes Google Plus and all posts shared.

- The majority of Google's services offer open APIs and follow open standards and allow third party integrations.

- Heck, many of their products they fully open source and give to the whole community, including Chrome, ChromeOS, Android, GWT, etc

Compare this to facebook. You can't export anything out of facebook in any kind of open format. You can not easily delete your account, even when you do your pictures and images remain on other people's accounts. Facebook offers very few open APIs to integrate with it, they want you to instead write apps that run ON the platform so they can control and monetize everything you create.

Re:Yes, because it is

[brunes69]

Facebook explicitly says they do not allow you to delete your account. They simply DO NOT ALLOW IT. And all data you post on facebook is theirs, they claim ownership of it. So no wonder they don't allow you to delete it.

Google allows you to delete your account and tells you exactly what happens when that occurs. http://www.pcworld.com/article... . And they claim ownership of nothing.

The companies attitude toward privacy and accountability are so different it is not even in the same hemisphere.

Facebook is for lazy people

[future assassin]

Seriously anyone who has been on the "public" internet since say 1995 knows there are plenty of places to have "social" experiences on the internet from IRC chat to community forums. I see dedicated Facebook users as social retards who just follow the new cool trends and are too lazy to be involved in several "social" fronts on the intertubes. There``s no helping them they are who they are and will follow other to the next cool thing.

I get more than enough social experience from running game servers and interacting with the game players, chatting on irc and visiting and posting on different interest forums.

Re:Don't be a Twit!

[LookIntoTheFuture]

Surely, you can't be serious?

It's a large building with lots of doctors, but that's not important right now.

...and don't call me Shirley

Can't power themselves...

[CohibaVancouver]

I don't think FB will 'Power the Future' because there's a lot of stuff they simply can't get right. Take their new search. If I enter "James Bond" into a Facebook search, my expectation is that the first thing it will search is my friend's feeds, followed by the feeds of companies and organization I like, followed by public feeds - Returning "James Bond"- related Facebook posts. Instead it just does a lousy web search. Why?

Or take ads. I'm a Facebook regular, posting daily. Yet FB has never been able to serve an ad up to me about anything I care about. Never. Not once.

...and my feed is just a total dog's breakfast with FB selectively choosing what to show me. I know I can pick "show recent" but the setting doesn't stick for more than 48 hours or so...

So will they power the future? No. They can't even power themselves.

Where does Facebook say that?

[Shakrai]

Facebook explicitly says they do not allow you to delete your account.

I left Facebook a few months ago and specifically requested deletion, not deactivation. There was a 14 day waiting period, during which time I could log back into my account and reset the clock, but supposedly at the end of those 14 days my account was gone for good. From what I can tell they still allow you to do this: "If you don't think you'll use Facebook again, you can request to have your account permanently deleted. Please keep in mind that you won't be able to reactivate your account or retrieve anything you've added."

Frankly leaving social media was the best thing I ever did. It's a bit of a PITA with regards to those friends who seemingly only know how to communicate via FB, but even they eventually came around and started calling, texting, or e-mailing me. Only one of my friends really whined about it, because she doesn't have a cell and can't text, but she eventually got used to e-mailing me.

nonsense

[excelsior_gr]

Facebook is transitioning from a simple social network to a full-fledged technology company that rivals Google

In what world is Facebook a full-fledged technology company that rivals Google? Let's see what each company offers me:
Google's search engine was a big thing when it started; it meant that you didn't have to use a shitload of search engines to find stuff (meta-search engines, anyone?) and now it rightfully dominates this market. Google gave me free email that didn't suck (well maybe some redesigns did) and has tons of space: people left Hotmail and never had to look back. Google Maps and Earth are just mind-blowing if you come to think of it, so I don't really have to comment on those. Google bought YouTube, and now serves us our vids, too. Google has stuff like the Google Art project that produces high-quality scans of artwork around the globe and silently delivers them to Wikipedia, so that we can all enjoy them for free. Google produced the OS that powers my phone and its browser, so that we get some diversity at least in the mobile world and don't get MS and Apple dominating that market as well (admittedly, it gets boring).

With Facebook, I can stay in touch with my friends that are in remote locations, upload my photos for them to see, and watch theirs. There is also some simple gaming going on (I'm not into it, but lots of people are). Oh, and with Instagram I can apply crappy filters to my photos. All 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.

FB is not a fully fledged tech company, they are a website for wasting your time. That's about it. I don't care how many little old ladies play candy crush or whatever the newest hot app is on FB, this won't make them a tech company unless they start developing some new tech. Continuously. If Google has been as stagnant as FB they wouldn't have gone past the development of their search engine.

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.

Re:Facebook Censorship

[Intrepid imaginaut]

RoK is woman hating shite. Exposing Feminism and The Anti White Knight Coalition are doing just fine, thanks.

And to think things were better just ten years ago

[Rexdude]

Remember RSS feeds? Back in the day when Feedburner wasn't owned by Facebook, you could install a desktop client or the sorely missed Google Reader to stay in touch with the sites and blogs that you felt were important. You had total control over what you wanted to read or subscribe to. If you ran a website, you put up an orange RSS icon, or let Firefox auto detect the feed and let the user decide what they wanted. RSS was (is) an open standard for publishing updates to a web site.
I would've said that Twitter & Facebook have killed it completely, but let's face it, RSS never really went mainstream. Google did not do enough to popularize Reader - just a core bunch of users wailed when they decided to shut down the service. Even Facebook had an RSS feed of the wall back in 2008 before they changed it to the 'news' feed format. Probably not the first time an open technology standard was thwarted by a large company, and won't be the last.

p2p social messaging system

[kevlar_rat]

Perhaps there is already someone doing this?

Yes, there are a number: diaspora, Friendica, and an emerging system based around RSS, this type of thing is usually called the federated social web. This is my own overview.

meta data and messaging data is spread around different peers as encrypted chunks

This is my proposal for exactly that

federated social networks

[kevlar_rat]

federated social networks will go the same way e-mail has gone: yes, there's tons of minor e-mail servers, but a few large companies control a very large fraction of e-mail traffic (espeically for personal use) because running a server is hard.

For a federated system based on an open protocol, it should be possible to have a desktop client which installs in a few clicks. You can install a mail server yourself, of course, but the main barrier to this is needing a domain name pointing to it. For a desktop 'node' of a P2P system, either it is always on, or you have a name resolution system built into the protocol, or you have to have a domain name and a static IP (or use a dyndns service). All of these have downsides. A workaround is to use the email system as a transport layer. Email servers then effectively act as proxies.

Another problem with a p2p service is that p2p networks require more processor and network usage than centralized services, so they make poor applications for mobile devices.

Well, with the federated model you would just visit a website. If the protocol allowed it, you could use a desktop app on your PC and a website on your mobile with the same account.