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Facebook Now Faces a Massive Backlash. But Will Anything Change? (fortune.com)
Slate argues that Facebook "is a normal sleazy company now," saying the company "obscured its problems and fought dirty against its critics" -- but that now its failings are being publicly aired. And Reason provides yet another example:
The Times also reveals that Facebook chose to support FOSTA (and its Senate counterpart, SESTA) -- legislation that guts a fundamental protection for digital publishers and platforms, and makes prostitution advertising a federal crime -- not as a matter of principle but as a political tactic to tar opponents and cozy up to Congressional critics.
Even Steve Wozniak has joined the critics, saying this week that Facebook should "stop putting money before morals," adding later that "I haven't seen them do one real thing." Woz also suggested that Facebook should allow users to export their data so they could upload it onto competing social networks.
Now long-time Slashdot reader pcjunky reports that the same scammy ad has been running on Facebook for a full two months after it was reported. But maybe they're just understaffed? Engadget reports that over the last six months Facebook has discoverd and eliminated 1.5 billion different fake accounts -- which is 200 million more than the 1.3 billion accounts it removed in the previous six months. On the Blind app, one Facebook employee reportedly asked the ultimate question: "Why does our company suck at having a moral compass?"
So where will it all lead? According to Fortune, Senators Chris Coons and Bob Corker "warned Friday that Congress would impose new regulations to rein in Facebook unless the social-media company addresses concerns about privacy and the spread of misinformation on its platform."
But will anything change?
Even Steve Wozniak has joined the critics, saying this week that Facebook should "stop putting money before morals," adding later that "I haven't seen them do one real thing." Woz also suggested that Facebook should allow users to export their data so they could upload it onto competing social networks.
Now long-time Slashdot reader pcjunky reports that the same scammy ad has been running on Facebook for a full two months after it was reported. But maybe they're just understaffed? Engadget reports that over the last six months Facebook has discoverd and eliminated 1.5 billion different fake accounts -- which is 200 million more than the 1.3 billion accounts it removed in the previous six months. On the Blind app, one Facebook employee reportedly asked the ultimate question: "Why does our company suck at having a moral compass?"
So where will it all lead? According to Fortune, Senators Chris Coons and Bob Corker "warned Friday that Congress would impose new regulations to rein in Facebook unless the social-media company addresses concerns about privacy and the spread of misinformation on its platform."
But will anything change?
Zuckerberg
As I recall, Facebook has always been one of the sleaziest companies on the planet. You'll recall the "dumb fucks" quote.
Beyond the obvious Betteridge response, Facebook is now a publicly traded corporation and board members of publicly traded corporations are required to do whatever it takes to increase the value of stocks or be voted out. This seems like a good idea until you realize this brings out the absolute worst and most sociopathic behavior. Facebook is not going to change.
However, what is going to change (eventually) is everyone else's obsession with Facebook. Sure, you'll always have a class of fools who will keep using it regardless of the what they hear but the allure is that other people are also using it. As more people recognize it's making them unhappy, more people will quit. The good news is that far fewer people from the latest generation are actually joining. Sadly, this pattern will only happen language by language. Small language bases will form quickly and evaporate just as quickly. However, widespread languages will slowly decay.
Ultimately, a better alternative to Facebook is going to be what eviscerates Facebook's userbase but it's corpse will forever haunt the internet just like MySpace.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
User data portability is one aspect of the GDPR that seems to have slipped under a lot of people's radar - and companies like Facebook too, it seems - but what Woz is asking for is pretty much echoing the requirements of the GDPR's Article 20: Right to data portability. Now that the EU's various governments are clearly looking for non-compliance examples that they could turn into additional revenue/legal case studies, they might want to get on that - especially since Zuck seems determined to keep giving the finger to requests from the EU to attend meetings to discuss Facebook's approach to user data, fake news, and political manipulation.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Because Facebook is spying on you even if you don't use it.
Because every website that has a Facebook Like button on it is sending information about you back to Facebook.
Because every website that loads Facebook Javascript is sending information about you back to Facebook.
Facebook knows where on the Web you've been, what kinds of products you look at, what kinds of websites and articles you read, what your probable demographics, income and political views are. They know what kind of work you do. They know where your house is, within a quarter mile. They know what kind of restaurants and movies you like. If you share a machine with someone, Facebook can tell whether it's you or the other person using it. If you clear all your cookies or use a different machine, Facebook can quickly (re)determine that it's you.
And that's all if you DON'T use Facebook.
""Why does our company suck at having a moral compass?"
Because Greed N. Corruption is CEO of US Capitalism, and has been for a long time now.
And Facebook is hardly the only one who's morally bankrupt here. All the other mega-corporations do it. They're just not standing in the spotlight, live-streaming their dirty laundry for the world to see right now. Even if they were, they wouldn't care.
The world is so flat right now that all of the mega-corps always have plenty of customers. Corporate Arrogance is the standard by which they act. They're going to do what makes them money, and no longer give a shit about how they treat you or what you want. That is why you repeatedly hear stories about companies doing shit that seems to make little or no sense from a consumer demand standpoint, with the end result being more profit, which is all that matters. This is why you have $1000 smartphones with a ton of bullshit features you never asked for bolted to non-removable shitty batteries. This is why you new cars come with $10,000 worth of shit you don't want, but is now standard. All new computers will soon have soldered memory and storage with no upgrade options. It's become almost impossible to find a new non-Smart TV, and soon will be the case for every appliance in your house.
My advice? Buy stocks. Because you can't beat 'em and won't leave 'em (en masse) to stand up to this bullshit.
There are dozens of other companies on the Internet which collect your information without your consent. Facebook is not the worst offender and if everyone's so concerned, we must enact the laws which make information gathering illegal in general vs. persecuting Facebook alone.
Also, just also, the way the web was designed in the first place makes it very difficult to evade such kind of tracking, so this issue must be solved at the web browser level as well. I've solved it by using session only cookies, having NoScript installed and disabling web browser disk cache. But that's not nearly enough unfortunately since your web browser leaves dozen of fingerprints which are very difficult to hide unless you switch to the Tor browser.
Let's be honest: tracking on the Internet is a serious issue and it's not just Facebook which abuses it to its advantage.
I love the idea... but unfortunately that also involves the general public accepting something they've never been willing to consider. Paying for their services. Something else happened about 20 years ago. Sites realized their banner adds weren't paying the bandwidth. Then came mass splits in how to deal with it. Some attempted to make their adds bigger and more obnoxious. Full page adds, flash ads, "please watch this video", audio ads etc... Some tried the paywall method, either some or all of the content only availible if you pay a monthly fee. These 2 methods were both pretty big failures in their own right. Bottom line, people didn't want to pay for access to pages as they felt that they already were paying for them by paying their ISP (though of course ISP's don't exactly give throwbacks to content creators, only hosting/bandwidth fees). So lastly google basically created the tracking system, IE small unintrusive ads that were effective because of advanced targetting and tracking. Of course that's the privacy nightmare... but it's the first one that wasn't in peoples face. It didn't interupt the consumption of content the way obnoxious ads did, and sadly extra fee's never quite suited people. In order to get rid of the crappy practices, someone needs to come up with a viable new system. The current methods being crap is a valid statement, if someone actually comes up with a working way to turn views into cash without tracking or ruining the experience, they'd become very wealthy very fast.