https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Plenty of HN users post criticisms of Facebook (among other things) while remaining substantive and thoughtful. Please be more like them when posting here.
It isn't that you owe better to Facebook (or whoever). It's that you owe better to this community. Each comment posted here is responsible for the quality of the discussion that flows out of it.
There is an argument that is often made when I (or others) advocate for ad blocking, and it always involves the evocation of "the little guy" content creator / website owner who gets shafted when adblockers are used. The problem with this argument, and the reason that I feel fully justified - even obligated - to blanket block all ads, is that it is essential to exert SOME kind of pressure against the large surveillance companies. They clearly don't care about their user's preferences, so the next way to fight this trend is to erode, to the greatest extent possible, the economics of their operations.
Facebook and the rest of the surveillance corporations can create shadow profiles on me from my digital crumbs if they want. At the end of the day I cannot stop them from doing that - and that's why I will never view, click on, or interact with any online ad under any circumstances, to ensure that they don't reap any significant economic reward from stalking me. When / if a semblance of sanity returns to online advertising and the personal privacy rights of users are respected by default, I will change my behavior accordingly so that content creators are supported. In the mean time I directly donate where possible.
On a side note, I notice an obliquely similar situation with Comcast and other big, anti-consumer tech companies that cannot avoid having large customer-facing communications divisions. The people they have manning their phone systems are inevitably exhausted, desperate-sounding, and clearly under some sort of sales quota. Sometimes I almost think that Comcast intentionally makes the lives of their call center employees as miserable as possible so that customers feel guilty dealing with them on the phone and have a lower probability of complaining about the company - after all, why beat up the peon in the cubicle farm about working for a company they already hate? It's almost as if these big companies have decided to use regular people's lives as human shields to hide their inhumanity behind.
Good.
I think good things will come out of this.
I think Facebooks reach is just to big to actually force it to become good. Sure, you might make it change certain practices, but at the end of the day, they would still find 'problematic' ways to develop their business.
Other, similar companies as well (did someone say Google?)
As it is, even just where we are with the HN gestalt's opinion would have been difficult to imagine two years ago. It's slow, but it's a very strong opinion change. Another couple of years and having Facebook on your resume may be a problem getting your next job, who knows.
Next to companies like Palantir, AT&T(Room641A), Equifax, and hell, even credit card processors, I've always found the ire directed at Facebook to seem... scapegoatey? I'd observe that anger against those companies was quick to fade, and has not seemed to negatively impact employees to work for them, nor created a regulatory environment wherein that work isn't supported. (selfishly us-centric here)
Hell, after the snowden revelations, did those with NSA/govt credentials have trouble getting a job? If that didn't move the needle (and I say this as someone who had been doing gov. funded research at the time, and would have liked to see a stronger response) I'm pessimistic that we'll ever see meaningful long term perceptual shifts in this respect outside of when they're driven by a media-cycle furor.
(To address the root of this comment tree, I think the fad hasn't outlasted the media cycle, I think the media cycle has realized this topic continues to drive clicks for now)
Simply, I worry a lack of privacy, and lack of accountability for corporations/govt, has largely become normalized; or at least that people are increasingly unlikely to act in this direction without heavy media pressure. I hope I'm wrong.
As much as I hate Facebook, your initial assumption is wrong. The fact that the state deeds something illegal doesn't mean it's wrong, and vice versa. The state is a terrible arbiter of morality.
It's far better at it than a corporation focused on chasing "shareholder value."
The only reason we balk at thinking of tracking as immoral is because it's hugely unrealistic to combat it and outlaw it. And also because companies benefit enormously from it.
Citation needed? If we’re just swapping anecdotes, my experience has been that the vast majority of people I talk to are fine with being tracked on the internet, and think it’s a reasonable exchange for what they get out of it.
Is there survey data, for instance, that shows people actually feel strongly about this?
Edited to add: I think the most relevant survey data is people voting with their feet. And despite the 24-hour news cycle of Facebook privacy SNAFUs (both intentional and not), their user numbers aren't really falling off.
It's hard to take people seriously when they say "what Facebook does is profoundly evil, but it's outweighed by the value of cat videos/Crossfit videos/Tasty recipes/reading the political rants of acquaintances I haven't spoken to in a decade." :/
Also, from 2012-2013:
Study Finds Broad Wariness Over Online Tracking: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/most-americans...
Survey: 3 Out Of 4 Consumers Now Notice Retargeted Ads: https://marketingland.com/3-out-4-consumers-notice-retargete...
I think most people expect tracking by the website that they're on, and ONLY that website. That's mainly for improving the website experience and so on. It wouldn't be a privacy violation since it's only their behavior for that website specifically, and no behavior from the other websites.
So in reality we're talking about websites that allow third party tracking or sell tracking information to third parties. That's a privacy violation.
That is a lie. I didn't vote for the current state, and neither did majority of citizens.
I mean, can you imagine proposing tomorrow, "in rural parts of the country, let's give people 3x the voting power of those in urban parts of the country"? And yet, here we are.
What can we expect from someone who looks like someone very greedy without any sense of morals? We should be rather happy he didn't become mass murderer or politician.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-i...
Interestingly, he did it by recording failed sign-in attempts, seeing if any of the journalists appeared in the logs, then trying the passwords out on their email accounts.
Maybe Facebook's recently-announced log of 600m+ passwords was a feature not a bug...
The recording failed sign ins to harvest the journalist's passwords always intrigued me. It does make you think when you see they are recently logging passwords.
Yet... I don't think a presidential campaign is out of the question for Zuck at some point in the future.
If your only information to support your post is a fictionalised movie, then maybe it's appropriate to wait to make your post until you can gather more information.