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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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.

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.