Companies are relentlessly profit-optimizing entities, and they cannot forego the extra revenue stream. Employees with ethics are like tissue holding back a tidal wave.
The only way to avoid having them exploit the data is to deny them the data in the first place.
> and they cannot forego the extra revenue stream. Yes. They CAN. And if the incentives were in the right place they would. For instance, Coke would probably sell more fizzy sugar water if it still used cocaine as an ingredient, but it doesn't, because it's illegal.
Honestly, they'd take your money and still treat you as a product and sell you. Their entire corporate culture is built around users being the product, and small cash payments won't change that.
Nothing short of firing the entirety of Facebook's leadership and a good fraction of its other employees will change how it views its users.
You make that sound like a fact...can you please provide sources!
I am asking this because it doesn't align with my personal assessment of people who I know that work at Facebook or Google...like not at all!
> Every business has its founding DNA. Real corporate change is rare, especially when the same leaders remain in charge. In Facebook’s case, we are not speaking of a few missteps here and there, the misbehavior of a few aberrant employees. The problems are central and structural, the predicted consequences of its business model. From the day it first sought revenue, Facebook prioritized growth over any other possible goal, maximizing the harvest of data and human attention. Its promises to investors have demanded an ever-improving ability to spy on and manipulate large populations of people. Facebook, at its core, is a surveillance machine, and to expect that to change is misplaced optimism.
This observation also would also likely apply to a hypothetical Facebook that offered user subscriptions:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm:
> One thing I’ve observed with Google over the years is that it is institutionally so used to its ‘customers’ actually being its products that when it gets into businesses where it actually has customers it really has little sense of how to deal with them.
Google's "customer service" is automated and unstaffed. When they're used to doing it that way, why reduce margins to staff a call center for the paying customers? Treat the paying customers and ad-watching users alike. Likewise, when you've built a mechanism to monetize user data, and you're used to running your business off it, why shut it all off for the few that pay you? It's "leaving money on the table." Keep it on, but maybe tone it down a little, and make even more money. To resist these temptations requires a strong culture that Facebook obviously does not have.
Easy to do in theory, hard to do in practice.
[1] https://medium.com/@oddbert2000/call-for-a-facebook-users-st...
It's rather obscure term to use outside a nautical context, so I agree it's a bad name if targeting the general public. It would be a fine name if its target audience was only sailors.
"Hey non-technical friend, instead of Facebook you should use Secure Scuttlebutt; it's so much better!"
I also wish I could client-side encrypt all of my content, share the keys with my friends who I want to have the ability to view my content, and somehow have this all be friction-less and transparent from my and contacts' perspective.