Internal Facebook documents seized by British lawmakers suggest that the social media giant once considered selling access to user data, according to extracts obtained by the Wall Street Journal. Back in April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told congress unequivocally that, “We do not sell data.” But these documents suggest that it was something that the company internally considered doing between 2012 and 2014, while the company struggled to generate revenue after its IPO.
This just goes to show that no matter what promises a company makes, once the shareholders come knocking, they’ll disregard all promises, morals, and values they claim to have.
The word Marxist is too often used as an insult.
In fact he was a historian who understood clearly the balance of people between people and corporations.
Lesser well known is his analysis on the corrosive impact of feudal-corporate capitalism on ethics, psychology and culture.
He didn’t only point the finger at greedy capitalists, but also at the desire for “spectacle” that led people to give up more of their mental and physical health in search of it.
Hm, when i see lot of adjectives in front of “capitalism-ists”, especially in the name of Marx, smells like a whitewashing.
I’m not white-washing capitalism.
It’s used as an insult because more than 100 million people were killed in the 20th century because’ of his ideology.
Macka,
Any ideology can be dangerous in the hands of a regime bent on imposing it on others. While it may be a stain in the eyes of many, it’s not necessarily fair to allow cases of abuse to represent the merit of an idea.
If it were, then we might want to think of getting rid of journaling features in file systems(*).
https://www.zdnet.com/article/reiser-fs-the-open-source-file-system-…
* I’m joking, don’t take this seriously
Definitively. Corporations have only one value: Make more money without worry about sustainability in USA, and they’ve infected the government with deeply entrenched corruption.
The USA is done because of that and the politicians do not know it, or maybe worse, they might just not give a shit about it.
I don’t see how it “proves” anything. After all, they DIDN’T actually do it. They “considered” it, and said no.
A company that has `considered` something several times is already convinced that’s the direction they want to go – they just chicken out when push comes to shove. That’s not a company anyone should have confidence in.
I made up a name for Facebook, and a friend of mine was showing a caller ID app, my Facebook name showed up on it when I called him! Goes to show, they sell your phone numbers at least to third parties, or allow them through an API.
I promptly removed all real data from there.
They also have a 2fa setup, which is useless because they literally ask you if you fail to log in if you’d just like to click a link…
No. The app has a “use contacts” permission. He allowed that. so it synced the phone number you had in your facebook profile for some bizarre reason to the contact he had in his phone.
For the love of pete, don’t give facebook information it doesn’t need or any permissions for any of the data outside of facebook.
Link in an email sent to the adress associated with FB account? That should be reasonably secure…
Shareholders want dividend and value from their investment. Of course they do. This is basically how our pensions are funded after all.
What surprises me more than anything is this self inflicted damage. Facebook is, at its core a company selling data it gains via a single product. Once the bad reputation overtakes the perceived benefit, users will leave. The only reason I have Facebook still is because of event planning. Through no small effort, I have removed All my posts and images (over a decade of use). If I trusted them, I wouldn’t have felt compelled to put the effort in to detangle myself.
As quickly as Facebook came into being, it can disappear.
Edited 2018-12-01 23:59 UTC
If you don’t give they still get it from your friends.
That is the world we live in.
If you assume that everyone is going to use your data in ways that you don’t know or could ever dream about then IMHO, you won’t be far off the mark.
FaeceBook is top of the pile at the moment but they are all at it.
Some of their use of our data is incredibly frustrating.
Take Amazon. How many Anvils do they think I need. These are once in a lifetime purchases yet they still seem to think I want to buy more of them… Madness.
There are a few companies who very publicly state that they don’t collect sellable data on you but these are very much in the minority.
A sad reflection on our society at the end of 2018.
Clearly you need more Anvils!
shotsman,
That’s hilarious!
You make valid points. It’s hard even to keep control of your own data. I clear cookies and use aggressive blocking to minimize tracking. Still, some websites make it unavoidable to send tracking information to 3rd party trackers to participate. Re-capthca is a common one. Newegg, stack overflow and many others force us to allow googles trackers in the browser
https://termsfeed.com/blog/privacy-policy-recaptcha/
I strongly object to 3rd party javascripts for privacy and security reasons, but google loves encouraging websites to link to it’s servers under the hood for their data mining.
Edited 2018-12-03 08:13 UTC
Doesnt the whole Cambridge Analytica thing show that they did a bit more than consider it? I mean, its their entire business model…
Edited 2018-12-03 21:40 UTC
This is no surprise. They essentially already do this, selling profile data to advertisers, albeit anonymized.
it wasn’t just seeing data, it wasn’t just the while Cambridge Analytica thing, it wasn’t just the subversion of democracy in the US ..
.. they actively attacked critics using antisemitic tropes, according to several news reports who base their analysis on content seized by the Uk authorities
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/14/facebook-george-s…