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A comment on Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize. Parent comment

Re:Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize by WorldMaker on Monday March 26, 2018 @02:35PM (#16681268)
The trouble being that customer is 1) an aggregate (there likely is no the customer, just some customers, maybe a lot of them), 2) fuzzy (Facebook's real customers are advertisers, they pay the bills). How do non-ad-buying users matter as customers to Facebook? Only so far as they are aggregate eyeballs to feed to the real customers, advertisers?

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

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Re:Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize by d0lph on Monday March 26, 2018 @02:56PM (#16681464)
If you do something users don't like, they will leave if they want to, or else they don't care.

> How do non-ad-buying users matter as customers to Facebook

They are literally all Facebook has, eyeballs.

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Re:Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize by WorldMaker on Monday March 26, 2018 @03:19PM (#16681633)
Yes, but see point 1. Facebook only has eyeballs in aggregate, as statistics (to show/hide from advertisers as Facebook sees fit). What does one snowflake matter to the mountain? When is an avalanche visible to Facebook? When is that avalanche visible to its customers, the advertisers? (Directly: When it tells them, presumably. If it tells them. Indirectly: Through slow user studies, and Big Data analysis, presumably.)
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Re:Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize by d0lph on Monday March 26, 2018 @03:30PM (#16681707)
> When it tells them, presumably.

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.

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