1. Rebranding Facebook as secure and private

2. If this increases usage, more opportunity to display ads

3. Their data shows they gain more information by monitoring what people publicly share, not say in private

4. Removes all responsibility to work with law enforcement and governments for illegal activity, since it's encrypted

These are users who didn't even use it. But just seeing the Facebook login option there next to email (it was the only OAuth) gave them the creeps. These aren't tech savvy users either, just regular small town businesses

I think Facebook has a long, long, long way to go towards brand repair before anyone can 'trust' it in any way

One client really wanted Facebook login so I had to make a Facebook account. That was a dark day.

On a somewhat related note, that business is no longer operating. I still host their site for free, partly out of smugness as they took none of my advice.

What’s surprising to me is that it still works!

I imagine that Gates played to win in business, as many others do, it's just that he was particularly good at it.

Now he's playing hard and to win in philanthropy.

I doubt he gives 2 bits what the average person thinks of him, at least not enough to throw money at rehabilitating his image. If that was his goal, his philanthropy targets would be different.

So one must find another way to feed ones ego. What is left apart from fulfilling the god complex and saving the world?

Edit: has->have

Well one thing I can think of is wanting to make the world better

Personally I believe he should pull a Bill Gates, hand over the reigns and take his philanthropy private.

Legally, he has a duty to maximize value for his board and investors. And there hasn't been a business model that provides a free consumer web product without monetizing user data.

Please stop repeating that nonsense.

You should probably stop using the word "legally" in this context. There have been thousands of companies over the decades that put other things before shareholder value, and somehow managed to not run afoul of the law.

Also, it might help if you provided a citation to this law to bolster your argument.

And there hasn't been a business model that provides a free consumer web product without monetizing user data.

Also false.

There's all the Redhat / enterprise open-source examples, but I'm specifically talking about consumer web products. Redhat's product is enterprise infrastructure.

There's free as in a trial or limited functionality to get you to buy the premium offering, but then the business model isn't really based off a free product... the free product is a promotion, not a business model.

You can have one group of premium users subsidize all the free users. In social, the main examples would be LinkedIn or Angelist, but again, access to the user data is the product these companies eventually sell.

There's Wikipedia, but that's a non-profit. Nothing wrong with that, people make a living that way and we need more like it, but I'm talking about companies where profits can serve as a strong motivator. This also excludes government services.

Maybe Google Maps qualified as free in the beginning, but any free service that Google makes is pretty much some clever way to acquire more user data to support other parts of the enterprise. HN itself falls under this category: HN is an ingestion pipeline for YC (the YC app asks for your HN handle, hello future YC app reviewer!).

I know it's a trite and a tired saying, but it really is true: if you're not paying for it, you are the product. That's not bad per-se... another way of looking at it is in the same way the sharing economy unlocked underutilized physical assets, these services have unlocked a new source of wealth not measured by our wallets: our attention. Lets describe it as we pay for these services with our attention-dollars.

My point is anything that's a "free consumer service" business model is really some kind of machine that converts attention-dollars into cash-dollars.

I would love to see a discussion of non-cash-dollar, non-attention-dollar business models. If you can think of a way of giving away Something that People Want (TM) for free without the corrupting influence of optimizing for their attention, well, you've found the next genuinely interesting unicorn.

I'm certainly not an expert on this subject but monetizing based on relevant content is reasonable. You can still make money without gathering a tremendous amount of user data.

[0]https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates

This was about the other half of the reply that hasn't been explored. Lets make threads here more interesting than an infinite uh-huh!/nuh-uhh!/uh-huh! loop.

Some CEO's like Elon and Jobs can spin a great story and hold on by sheer force of personality, but pension funds aren't buying FB in bulk to get more green cars on the road.

That has nothing to do with the legal requirements of the company or the CEO. That would be the same as saying I am "legally required" to go to work tomorrow, because I could get fired for not showing up.

Citation needed!!!

It is not illegal to have other goals than maximizing shareholder value.

For example, Costco. Publicly traded company but the employees are paid well, customers are well taken care of, and the CEO is rewarded for this. In the short-term, Costco could generate an enormous amount of value by automated, reducing wages, and finding cheaper supplies and lowering quality, selling their customer's membership information, etc.

But they don't. And there is nothing illegal about it.

Could you ever believe that's not all that he does with ads?

Why would a person who believes those things have made the "dumb fucks" quote?

That's the upside-down society we live in today.

He very obviously hasn't.

People need to understand, ANYTHING you use on the internet opens you up wide to privacy violations. Anything you use on the internet can end up in the hands of law enforcement. And certainly any SOCIAL network is, by its very nature, NOT private.

There is no way to be on the internet, and be completely opaque to the larger world at the same time. Zuckerberg is lying to you. So are Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, and Wire. If you're worth it, the US can track you. (Not just the US, several other nations and organizations can as well.)

Your buddy who told you that they couldn't find you behind that pseudonym as long as you were using a VPN? Yeah... he lied.

But here's the real problem, no one cares.

No one cares about privacy, because they all feel that they have nothing to hide. I know the feeling, I understand the feeling. But this is bigger than us as individuals.

The internet needs to be rearchitected, bit by bit. In concert with that effort, we need to agitate for some laws that prevent data sharing. Some laws that have real teeth.

This doesn't interfere with tracking.

Most people, when they think about privacy, think about the disclosure of specific posts to unintended audiences. They often don't think about the tracking beacons silently categorizing everything.

So in short, it's perfectly possible to have "privacy friendly" Facebook - if your definition of privacy doesn't extend to being free from ad trackers.

Advertising dollars are far more lucrative if you think you can trust where you're sharing your deepest, darkests...

Imagine what people would share between themselves if it wasn't "public for the world to see". Imagine how many more data points that would produce for targeted advertisements on the Facebook platform, alone.

Edit: Including necessary reference to Bill Hicks[0].

[0] - https://youtu.be/GaD8y-CGhMw

You mean like a Google search?

If you don't mean a Google search, I'm not sure what you could mean. What could possibly be more intimate than a person's lifelong history of general queries in their pursuit of knowledge and personal identity?

Oftentimes those queries are even natural language sentence fragments that directly convey the person's intentions.

What more are you claiming a company could infer by convincing their userbase that their data remains private?

If you're considering buying a motorcycle and have a friend (or a group of friends) that own(s) a motorcylce, are you more likely to ask that friend (or that group) the pros/cons of owning a motorcycle and for their recommendations or are you far more likely to use "nature language sentences" in Google to illicit that information (e.g.: "I'm thinking of buying a motorcycle")?

I'm going to posit that the former occurs far more frequently than the latter and that this is the potential "untapped market" for targeted advertising that a "private social network" would be after.

Regardless, it's pretty easy to infer from the person's Google searches what their friends told them. And if that user has an Android phone Google also has their location data to cross-reference with it, plus data gleaned from CC purchases and probably lots of other sources I haven't yet read about.