Hobby Lobby or a car manufacturer might find a way to combine civic duties with corporate profits, social media will never be able to. Their entire business model is based on squeezing as much value as possible out of the limited attention span of consumers.
Google isn't a paragon, and it's alarming (to me) that Google is building a universal panopticon too. But these two companies, despite the similarity in their business models, appear very different with respect not just to how they collect data, what they collect, how much they sell, and what breaches or not-breach breaches have occurred, but also how forthcoming they are about all this, and whether they act like they've got something to hide. Facebook used tricks[1] to run their iPhone app in the background when requested not to, and only backed this out when the new iOS “battery shaming” feature outed them; they uploaded Android call history with text that mislead the user into thinking they were just uploading contacts. Google has made mis-steps and knows a scary amount about us, but I don't recall this kind of systematic boundary-pushing and post-discovery obfuscation and denial.
Or contrast Lyft and Uber.
These differences in behavior aren't from a difference in business models. They are from differences in “corporate DNA”, or culture. Zuckerberg was a teen when he wrote these messages[2], but most people I know don't speak or act like that even at that age. Some people advance to a different moral stage even at the end of, or after, their teen years; it looks from a longer pattern of evidence, only some of it recent, like Zuckerberg and his company may not have done so. Yes, business incentives are a factor, but explanations don't begin and end with “money made me do it”.
[1] http://pxlnv.com/linklog/facebook-background-data/
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-mark-zuckerbergs-se...
Corporate culture is a structure build on-top of their business, nobody has ever changed their business to adapt to their culture, they just get a rebranding and hire a PR team if the two happen to run into conflict.
That's clearly incorrect. Both Walmart and Costco are in the same retail business, but their corporate cultures are quite distinct.
Companies aren't individuals. They are aggregates, and (absence some major force, e.g. like Gates in MS or Jobs in Apple, or some important founding principles) aggregates tend to go to some mean, which in the case of companies includes profits above all.
There's a difference between "we did it because we were legally obligated" and "we did it because Zuckerberg wanted to". The myth of profit maximisation being an absolute legal duty is much too kind to Facebook here; they're not just a victim of our late capitalist system.
> It simply would not be a billion dollar business otherwise.
Right. Which is why their largest shareholder and CEO is going to ensure they do it, not because he's being forced by the spectre of shareholder lawsuits.
> Hobby Lobby or a car manufacturer might find a way to combine civic duties with corporate profits, social media will never be able to.
Certainly not if we continue to give them a pass when they fail to do so.
the company does whatever those that control the majority of the shares want it to do. Absolutely no one else, unless the company engages in illegal activity has any say. Corporations are democracies with the rules of majority that are spelled out in their documents.
The sad specter of case law dating at least as far back to Dodge v Ford [1], is that legally the only relationship that has to matter to a (US) business is its relationship with its shareholders. Consumer protections have only ever barely been carved out with regulatory action.
> How do non-ad-buying users matter as customers to Facebook
They are literally all Facebook has, eyeballs.
Snowflakes don't matter, if only one Facebook user cares about their privacy, then Facebook shouldn't care. Is it a perfect system? No. But it is democratic.
But I also think that Facebook is already on its way down, people seem to have moved on. At least according to their numbers they still seem to grow or at least remain stable but I would guess that this is mostly due to expansion into new markets and if people there go through a similar trajectory it is only a question of time until the last new market starts and eventually stops using Facebook.
Here in Germany MeinVZ [2] was the dominant social network until people started moving to Facebook and now MeinVZ is just a ghost town. And it pretty much feels the same with Facebook now, actually already for the last five or so years, people come back and engage more and more infrequently until they eventually disappear. It is much slower as compared to MeinVZ but I am pretty sure it is essentially the same thing.
I am not sure where they are all going, maybe Instagram for the younger generation, maybe just WhatsApp for friends in my age, so Facebook the company might just be fine for some more time even if Facebook the network dies. But things have certainly changed from this madness of, I don't know, somewhere between five and ten years ago, when Facebook became inevitable, when it was constantly in thew news, when every ad poster featured a Facebook link.
I would neither be surprised if it turned out that Facebook was an essentially quite short-lived onetime phenomenon and people were not that interested in a global community as the social media proponents would want you to believe, nor would I be surprised if every generation had its own Facebook even if just to set themselves apart from the older generation. Why would we even assume that social media is more than a fluke and does not die away just like many things before?
Only if enough of your friends were on it to make it worthwhile, the danger is that many of your contacts would disappear, which would lessen the value of facebook for even more people, leading to a vicious cycle. And even if it didn't happen to your social circle it would stem the inflow of young people even more than is already the case).
Then it's not much of a business, period.
In my ideal world, we'd only have businesses where the costs are open and direct (e.g. no "user is the product" or selling of personal data, or even "ad-based").
If they can't make it in this way, then, sorry, they don't have a business model.
Well, if there are no buyers, then why have a product?
That's only a myth in that it's not mandated. But it's still very much what almost every company will do, so it's a de facto (if not de jure) thing.
But it didn't used to be like that – not even that long ago, either. In 1970 Friedman released his essay "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits". Look at the corporate behavior he was criticizing:
> The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned "merely" with profit but also with promoting desirable "social" ends; that business has a "social conscience" and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers.
In other words, companies at that time WERE concerned about social responsibility, and not purely focused on profit. Friedman didn't like this; he called it "pure and unadulterated socialism".
Since that time this parasitic mentality was spread to and propagated by top schools like Harvard, dominating the world view of that next generation of businessmen/women. But it was never "a defacto" thing, and many are starting to catch on to the damage it has caused.
I agree with your implication in using the word "myth" that fiduciary duty as a concern is overblown in the collective world of public corporations (the decision in Dodge v Ford was hugely problematic and its shadow haunts us all), but it's not a myth in that it doesn't exist.
> Companies like Facebook, publicly traded, have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Private companies with investors are similarly obligated. Nowhere in the equation does it say that they’re obligated to do anything for you - the only role you serve is to be a vehicle for exploitation.
But I see an exception to this rule: Self-financed companies where the founders are still the shareholders and where the founders are in the company for the long run, and where the company is financed by the users.
If your company is financed by the users, then in order to make the business sustainable you need to optimize for the users. If the users demand privacy, then you optimize for privacy.
I'm aware that slow, sustainable growth is not popular in silicon valley, but that's probably a question of culture (in many european countries a lot of startups still follow this path).
But will they change? Zuckerberg, as far as I can tell, started Facebook because he wanted to be master of the (internet) universe. And then he hired a lot of really smart people with the same motives.
Are you hoping that at some point in time he is going to have a great moral conversion and decide to forego power and wealth and become a sort of saint who will give it all away? Seems to me far more likely Zuckerberg will pretend to reform, but keep pursuing the same goals.
What you are saying seems to be that we should not push decentralization and instead just wait around for something good to happen. Which in turn makes me wonder about your motivations.
The article is about why we need to decentralize. This is an important issue, and so we need to have a discussion to decide whether or not this is the right course of action. And we have this great resource, an internet comment section, in which to discuss it. And you are a netizen, so you should think about it and add in any useful comments you might have.
Instead you made a comment that derails the conversation off onto a track that it seems to me isn't useful. I see this happen a lot here at HN. There is a lot of useful discussion, but so often there are also people who make comments that derail the discussion, provoke an argument that isn't really relevant. I wish every commenter would first think out what is the basic issue at stake, and avoid making comments that lead to disputes that are off track from what needs to be discussed and decided.
Also, while I do like the expression "if you're not a customer, you're a product", it does not change the actual definition of the word customer.
> a person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or business
You may be confusing the word "customer" with the word "user"?
> 1. General: A party that receives or consumes products (goods or services) and has the ability to choose between different products and suppliers. See also buyer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer
> In sales, commerce and economics, a customer (sometimes known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a good, service, product or an idea - obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchange for money or some other valuable consideration
I think to me the customer is the one receiving the product, whether or not they have actually spent money.
Also for consideration, "paying customer" and "non-paying customer" are common(?) phrases.
As a counterpoint, see, for example, [1], that quotes the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision[2]: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
The argument in the OP article stands without this — it is nearly as bad that companies have incentives to misbehave, as if they were legally obligated to — but there is also room for improvement at the margin, if employees and customers understand that corporate actions are management’s choice; their hands are not tied.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
[2] https://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&v...