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Facebook Competitor Orkut Relaunches as 'Hello' (bloombergquint.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the speaking-of-status-updates dept.

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg: In 2004, one of the world's most popular social networks, Orkut, was founded by a former Google employee named Orkut Buyukkokten... Orkut was shut down by Google in 2014, but in its heyday, the network had hit 300 million users around the world... "Hello.com is a spiritual successor of Orkut.com," Buyukkokten told BloombergQuint... "People have lost trust in social networks and the main reason is social media services today don't put the users first. They put advertisers, brands, third parties, shareholders before the users," Buyukkokten said. "They are also not transparent about practices. The privacy policy and terms of services are more like black boxes. How many users actually read them?"

Buyukkokten said users need to be educated about these things and user consent is imperative in such situations when data is shared by such platforms. "On Hello, we do not share data with third parties. We have our own registration and login and so the data doesn't follow you anywhere," he said. "You don't need to sell user data in order to be profitable or make money."

6 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. How about I keep my data to myself by martok · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Posting my status updates and photos into yet another company's database doesn't appeal in the slightest. Put aside for the moment that they could be bought up and have their privacy policy changed. The inevitable data breach will expose my data in the end. There's a lot of talk about how Facebook sells our data to third parties. But how about why they are keeping it for so long in the first place?

    1. Re:How about I keep my data to myself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      giving in exchange for something, i.e. paid advertising IS SELLING.

    2. Re:How about I keep my data to myself by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As the Cambridge Analytica case shows, they do sell access to the data.

      Facebook did not sell any data to Cambridge Analytica.

      Facebook allowed university researchers limited access to user data. This was done at no cost, so there was no "selling". Those researchers then used the limited data with screen scrapers to get additional information on users, and then one or more of the researchers (not Facebook) passed the information on to Cambridge Analytica in blatant violation of their agreement with Facebook.

      Facebook was certainly careless and incompetent, but they didn't "sell" data, nor did they intend for most of the user data to be seen by anyone outside Facebook.

  2. WTF? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's not even a site... hello.com only talks about downloading some fucking "app". I have no phone. This is bullshit. And not a word about it in the summary... Retarded news.

  3. It already completely failed for me by ZorinLynx · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There is no web version of it to use on a computer.

    If I'm sitting in front of my computer already, I don't want to have to use my phone just to access a site.

  4. Re:intrinsically defective by Alain+Williams · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Social media need the network effect to succeed. Facebook has grown big because many people can find their friends there (and then acquire fake friends)

    If they want to grow they need to work on a social media interworking protocol - so that you can link to people who use different social media platforms. They will not become the next Facebook, they might succeed as one of a federation of social media platforms that all work together. Facebook will refuse to interwork with other SM platforms until it finds that it is loosing users to the SM federation.