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FB Makes Most Hated List Again

Facebook is the top non-utility company and number four on the “10 Most Hated Companies in America List for 2012”.

Facebook has had customer satisfaction issues for some time, but recently did a particularly good job of alienating a portion of its nearly one billion members. According to the ACSI, Facebook is one of the most strongly disliked American companies, beaten out only by three public utilities companies. This comes in part from the company’s continuing user privacy concerns. Mark Zuckerberg’s company did not help itself in this regard in 2012, after it announced that it had the right to republish any and all photos in the accounts of its Instagram users.

Surely most of the sheep won’t mind getting shorn and Zuckerberg will continue to find new ways to shear them. Congrats!

Written on 11 January 2013 by admin under Corporate Greed, Personal Data for Sale, Privacy, Stealth with No Comments

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.

Zuckerberg_fbitchslapped

Written on 31 December 2012 by admin under Business Ethics, Privacy with No Comments

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.

Written on 04 October 2012 by admin under Business Ethics with No Comments

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).

Written on 29 September 2012 by admin under Business Ethics, Corporate Greed, Personal Data for Sale with No Comments

Who cares about their users’ email?

At least not Facebook. Their brilliant new lock-in feature @facebook.com has destroyed many address books and lost tons of email (or maybe they just placed the email in the “Other” folder, but still synced address books to mostly unusable @facebook.com addresses).

I must admit I’m surprised to see this huge SNAFU. Usually Facebook is sinister and getting worse in terms of user abuse, but savvy in terms of tech and getting better.

Written on 05 July 2012 by admin under Uncategorized with No Comments

It’s the Dopamine, Stupid

Oversharing on social media may be a quasi-sexual experience with intrinsic value and commensurate reward-system stimulation, just like a delicious meal or a sexual contact.

The reward given by a person’s brain when a Facebook posting of theirs is viewed, liked and commented on has proven to be comparable in pleasure to the response from food and sex, according to a recent Harvard University study.

So now you know that someone obsessively using their smartphone for “sharing” is actually quasi-masturbating.

 

Written on 28 June 2012 by admin under Uncategorized with No Comments

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”.

 

Written on 28 June 2012 by admin under Business Ethics, Corporate Greed, Stealth with No Comments

It’s the Zuckerberg, Stupid!

An interesting take on the “oversharing” deluge of information that will be made far worse by Apple sheep:

I blame it on what I call Zuckerberg’s Bubble — not a reference to the current (and rapidly deflating, thanks to FB’s IPO) tech bubble, but to the social bubble Zuckerberg has been living in since his Harvard dorm-room days, when he started monomaniacally coding Facebook into existence. When you’re in college, and still trying to figure out your identity, you’re almost hardwired to feel like you’re being left out (especially if you’re a nerd) of all the coolest stuff that’s going on, both on and off campus. So you convince yourself that you actually care what all your friends and acquaintances are doing at all times.

So cool kids have too much attention paid to them anyway, so they can afford to (or even have to be be) more aloof and not “share” much. OTOH geeks and nerds and Zuckerbergs are obsessed with the sharing game as they desperately crave attention in their lonely worlds. This is why Facebook was created. Interesting.

 

Written on 22 June 2012 by admin under Uncategorized with No Comments

ZIA

The Zuckerberg Intelligence Agency is saving the original a lot of time and money. This “The Onion” story is actually true and real, at least according to the Daily Mail. Oh well.

Written on 02 June 2012 by admin under Government Abuse, Personal Data for Sale with No Comments

Leaving Facebookistan

A nice essay on the reasons for leaving FB after the complete corporate takeover (aka IPO):

Zuckerberg’s business model requires the trust and loyalty of his users so that he can make money from their participation, yet he must simultaneously stretch that trust by driving the site to maximize profits, including by selling users’ personal information. The I.P.O. last week will exacerbate this tension: Facebook’s huge valuation now puts pressure on the company’s strategists to increase its revenue-per-user. That means more ads, more data mining, and more creative thinking about new ways to commercialize the personal, cultural, political, and even revolutionary activity of users.

There is something vaguely dystopian about oppressed peoples in Syria or Iran seeking dignity and liberation inside a corporate sovereign that is, for its part, creating great wealth for its founders and asserting control over its users.

[…]

for now, at least, Facebook concedes to its users only when it judges that it is in the corporation’s interest to do so; what user votes and consultations there may be are purely advisory. As MacKinnon observes, this system suggests the political control strategies of the Chinese Communist Party: periodic campaigns of state-managed openness and managed local democracy.

Every three months “investors” now will want to hear about new plans to monetize users and their friends. This is just the beginning.
Written on 28 May 2012 by admin under Personal Data for Sale, Privacy with No Comments