BR sums up Facebook:
Sure, Facebook is the new Microsoft in terms of being a ubiquitous, evil company run by a snotty little group of shits — hey, come to think of it, where is the old Microsoft on the list?
Category Archives for Business Ethics
Snotty Shits
Zuckerberg FBitchslapped
Randi FBitchslapped by FB “privacy”, and hitting right back at innocent Twitter user. This story is almost as stupid as the faces of the people in it. ‘Nuff said.
Facebook Starts Charging for News Item Ranking
Facebook has announced the option to pay US$ 7 to promote a post to friends’ news feeds. This is nothing to frown upon. Unlike most of FB insidious social graph exploitation and user privacy abuse, this is completely transparent and an entirely legitimate business practice.
It may even be beneficial on the path to monetize the web: Users are getting used to paying for purely digital token services, the next step up for the artificial pigs or whatever crap people buy in Zynga games. The problem of course may be that facebook will have your credit card details and may stealthily or openly start charging for other services.
Facebook Now Tracks You Online and Off
FB has known everything you do online for some time now. Thanks to its sagging stock price they now take intrusion and user abuse to a new level: FB now matches online and offline data on a massive scale. Online ads will be targeted at you according to your offline purchases. Here’s how to opt out (until FB finds a workaround).
More Fences for the Herd
FB has given every user a @facebook email address and made this address the default for display on users’ FB profile.
“This is a direction Facebook needs to move in – your email is a proxy for your identity on the internet and Facebook want to usurp people’s pre-existing email identities with their own to help drive up traffic to its site and lock users into its service.
As usual, user’s weren’t asked or informed beforehand.
It’s even more appalling how FB burns its PR shills, having them take the flak for their greed motivated stealth actions:
“We basically defaulted to show your Facebook address as we rolled this out, just to keep it consistent for everyone,” said Meredith Chin, Facebook’s manager of product communications.
She repeated the word “consistent” several times in her attempt to explain Facebook’s rationale for the change.
[…]
Chin couldn’t elaborate on why Facebook didn’t communicate the email change before it happened.
“We as a company know we’re always under a microscope, but sometimes there are certain things…” Chin said, trailing off. “Well, you plan for everything to be as loud as possible. But sometimes things come up that we need to be better about.”
Certainly a herd of sheep may need to be “consistent” for the benefit of FB, but it appears that FB employees get primed to focus on a particular positive meme in public statements, to make FB’s actions seem less sinister.
One is reminded of the Zuckerberg/Sandberg interview with Charlie Rose, when every noun, adjective and verb of their speech appeared to be variations of “share”.
IPO Frenzy and Privacy
BR on Facebook and today’s IPO:
No matter how many times I shut off notifications, raise privacy settings, and remove alerts, Facebook continues to send me email. It seems every time they change something, they willfully change my settings and ignore the email address removal. (Really, WhoTF thinks I have the slightest interest in “Sims Social?”)
Hmmm…. Sims Social. Sounds intersting. Gotta have a look.
Anyway good luck to FB for the first day of trading.
Suits and the Damage Done
FB is testing payment for post prominence, thus breaking the “always free promise”:
I have no problem with post promotion. I have a problem with paid post promotion. If this goes through, it will ruin Facebook.
If you consider that scores of imbeciles pay for virtual pitchforks on Zynga, they might as well pay for post promotion. But smart people will not submit to the suits and Goldman, get annoyed again, and leave.
Remnants of Sense
Harsh words, but important insights, destined to be largely ignored by the herd:
“Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record,” Moglen said of the founder of Facebook. “He has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age.”
Why? Because, Moglen said, Mark Zuckerberg had harnessed the energy of our social desires to talk us into a swindle. “Everybody needs to get laid,” Moglen said. “He turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality, and he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal. Namely, ‘I will give you free Web hosting and some PHP doodads, and you get spying for free all the time.’”
[…]
But as the business press and slavering investors look on eagerly at Zuckerberg’s coronation, many believe that the seeds of Facebook’s downfall have already been sown. The company might have brought people together like never before, but exploitation is woven inextricably into its DNA. Facebook makes its money by commercializing personal information, watching its users, analyzing their behavior, and selling what it learns.
[…]
What you share and what you click on affects what Facebook knows about your friends, too. And in the aggregate, all this personal information helps build a machine that can know the past and present and make good guesses about the future, a machine whose insights are incredibly valuable to everyone from corporations to state-intelligence services.
[…]
What makes Facebook so valuable isn’t the Web ads it serves up, but rather the unprecedented amount of information it has about its users, which it can then sell to third parties. Business intelligence—the data a company can scrape together about its customers—is the fastest-growing segment of enterprise computing. Major tech companies are snapping up companies that make business-intelligence software. But the software that does the data mining is only a tool—what really matters is how much data you have. And Facebook has a lot.
[…]
In Europe at least, Facebook’s users are becoming increasingly aware that Facebook is first and foremost a surveillance mechanism, and they don’t like it. If that realization spreads, Facebook’s most precious asset—its users—could stampede and flee to a safer network.
The societal vanguard will lead the way, out of Facebook and government control, into federated, more open, user-controlled systems that allow for anonymity and privacy.
Be Sure to Post Your Medical History
The new no-opt-out Big-Brother-friendly timeline feature is a boon for identity thieves, but also for Facebook and its advertisers:
EPIC’s letter also specifically mentions the Timeline “Health and Wellness” category, which suggests that users should update their profiles with life events related to medical changes. Facebook has partnered with pharmaceutical companies to market drugs and medical treatment to consumers, and EPIC sees a clear—and worrisome– connection.
That IPO is gonna fly off the pharmacy shelves.
Also: Less than two months after settling with the FTC and agreeing to let users opt-in to privacy changes, FB forces massive changes on members.
The article is a must read in its entirety.
From Mining to Shaping
Facebook goes from mining users’ data (and selling it to advertisers), to actively shaping users‘ behavior in the way that FBs “clients” desire.
Facebook, in short, aims not to be a Web site you spend a lot of time on, but something that defines your online — and increasingly offline — life.
“We think it’s an important next step to help tell the story of your life,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, who introduced the new features at the company’s annual conference for developers. He called what Facebook was doing an effort to “rethink some industries.”
FB continues to “reshape” privacy to make buck and the “Facebook as an opinion builder” development has given the new Big Brother an even bigger Face.