Open Letter to Mark ‘Facebook’ Zuckerberg
p2pnet news view | Advertising:- Dear Mark:
A lot of people who should know better believe your Facebook is the greatest thing since sliced bread. But like Google, MySpace, Yahoo, and all other corporate ’social networking’ outfits, it’s a hard-core advertising company. Nothing more.
You know it, and I know it.
Many (most?) of the same people believe 99 cents is a fair and reasonable price for a digital music file, and that there’s only one music player and portable phone worth buying. So it’s not surprising your Facebook, and the rest of them, prosper, despite the fact you’re not, apparently, doing nearly as well as you think you should be doing.
And that’s because members, curse them, are using the sites to, well, network with each other, instead of as launchpads for guided advertising missiles.
You and the owners of similar sites pay ‘creative’ persons big bucks to churn out copy written for the simple-minded, copy purporting to be genuine expressions of solidarity and support for users, but which in fact are carefully crafted so you can renage on them when it suits you – after all the fuss has died down, in short.
Empty, disingenuous, cockamamie psychobabble.
“Our main goal at Facebook is to help make the world more open and transparent,” you say in the introduction to your latest piece of unfiltered bull-shit.
‘Open and transparent’? Dark and devious, rather.
“We believe that if we want to lead the world in this direction, then we must set an example by running our service in this way,” you say. “We sat down to work on documents that could be the foundation of this and we came to an interesting realization – that the conventional business practices around a Terms of Use document are just too restrictive to achieve these goals. We decided we needed to do things differently and so we’re going to develop new policies that will govern our system from the ground up in an open and transparent way.”
Riiiight.
It all looks so reasonable, so sincere, so genuine — you and your crew of just plain folks doing your darndest to be fair.
Bollocks you are. You’re responding to our outrage, at the same time trying to find new ways to screw us.
Anyone who believes you, or any of the people running Google, MySpace, so on and et al, are just trying to be a Good Corporate Citizens, needs his or her head examined.
The meaning of ‘corporate’ in and of itself precludes that possibility.
Four people left comment posts to yesterday’s p2pnet story on your latest dirty doings, your efforts to weasel out of the fact you’ve been caught red-handed trying to shaft your users yet again as you try to ferret out as much about us as possible via bots of one kind or another, and surreptitious mining technologies, and then to own and market those data — our data – in any way you see fit.
I’m not saying Ban Advertising. But I AM saying, ‘Enough of this corporate crap you expect us to swallow like we’re complete idiots.’
Read the Reader’s Writes below, Mark, as well the numerous posts on your own site. Because you’re no longer dealing with dupes whose only sources of information emanate from the lamescream media.
You want our business? Ask nicely. And stop trying to screw, blue and tattoo us at every turn.
If you’re not willing to do that, better make sure you have another job to go to.
Who am I to say this to you? Just a guy in Canada – a Facebook ‘member’ who uses your site to communicate with other people, and whose daughter does the same.
It’s really simple. Be fair to me and I’ll be fair to you.
And while you think about that, below are the comment posts – honest expressions of anger, not carefully manufactured, carefully tweaked Facebook BS »»»
Reader’s Write – Cynical/Paranoid much? Sheesh.
Eeader’s Write – She’s not the only one cynical or paranoid in these days of datamining and legal government spying.
I would mention this is not the first time Facebook has tried to make hay off their users. I call to point the Beacon app that followed you everywhere you went on the net, reporting back to Facebook that data. Not only that but a database was setup for what you bought on line and others could view that data. How much value do you think advertisers were getting out of that? Notice they didn’t want to pay you for your data. Notice that they really didn’t even want to mention all of what Beacon did.
Only after one girlfriend found out what her boyfriend had bought her, before he had the time to get it to her, did the breach of your privacy really hit home. But what if it was medical data you paid a service on. Are you comfortable that some insurance company didn’t have their nose in your data for that? Or if that doesn’t apply, how about this little item. Since the days of the Patriot act, you can no longer buy home chemistry sets for kids to experiment at home with learning science. What you can buy is so limited in what they can do as to be worthless as far as learning real science by doing experiments. So if you attempt to buy something like this or even search for it, as an idea of what you might buy your kid, don’t be surprised if one day you get a knock on the door from Homeland Security.
If those are too far fetched for you, then how about kids being put on suspension for what their Facebook pages have on them relating to their school. Several incidents have already been to court over just such happenstances.
Don’t think for a moment in today’s connectivity of the internet, no one is interested in your data or that it could not have real life effects to you.
Given all that, you trust these owners of Facebook to be really interested in your welfare and not in the money your data could bring them, regardless of what that might do to you in your personal, real life?
I will not go to Facebook, knowing what they think of their members. I simply don’t want them to have my data for any reason. They’ve in the past already shown their idea of what constitutes privacy is far different than what you would think of as important in personal data to be held private.
Steve Holden Says - Not only that, Facebook recently held a meeting on the OpenId standard and refused to open it up to the technical community. We believe in open standards, as long as we get to decide how they work?
Hey, this is a capitalist society, let’s not be surprised when business people behave like capitalists
Leo M Says – I’ve pretty much just left my FB account as a marker to friends / family. Reasons:
* FB won’t allow RFC compliant email addresses that would allow me to track their spam. So using the address+Facebook@gmail.com trick that I use to track other services and see if they sell my address won’t work with FB. To them it’s an ‘illegal address’.. now why is that?
* FB with apps turns into a meaningless clutter of burps and farts. Without apps, Facebook = Twitter. So just go to Twitter already, bearing in mind that they may become like FB one day *sigh*
If you want to look at it another way, you can call FB & MySpace’s model ‘push $pam’, because unlike email you opted into it. Oh, and you invited your friends too.
* FB [, etal] has never gotten anyone ‘hired’ or ‘noticed’ in a good way. You can read all the stories about how folks get noticed in a ‘bad way’ every day. Students suspended, workers reprimanded, people stalked, etc. What you *should do* is get a Facebook account, friend everyone you know, and point them at LinkedIn or email. No pictures, no phone numbers. If you value your privacy.
* Apple has blocked Facebook at some of their stores. From a business view this makes sense. Not only are you sucking their network and not generating revenue for them, but it’s a potential privacy liability to them as well. Now apply this to yourself and the amount of time you spend on FB or MyS.
* Facebook was never interested in ‘user welfare’ any more than MySpace was or any other SNS.
Users are nothing more than a commodity, just eyeballs and impressions, revenue measurements to the *real* customers, the advertisers. When the advertisers cut their income streams to FB then you see ‘creativity’ like Beacon and this change of TOS and abrupt change back.
Cheers! And all the best …
Jon Newton – p2pnet
February , 2009
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February 28th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
The privacy switches on Facebook (when they finally put them in) have always told the story anyway.
Everything’s published by default, and the controls are needlessly obscure and complicated for most. And no matter how many complained about that, a change was never even discussed.
The way these switches are set up lead many to believe that certain settings might strangle off their friends’ ability to see it. The result is, people don’t tighten them down enough, and all the lurkers get to have a field day.
This can only be by design.
If Facebook really wanted you to have easy control of your info, these switches would have been straightforward, and the distinction between “friends” and those who haven’t been assigned that status would have stayed that simple.
For the same reasons as illustrated in the article above, my Facebook page has remained locked down and not allowed to grow the way it was originally intended. Locked down so much, in fact, that I’m forever getting outside invites from known friends to join Facebook. That’s because they can’t see me there. Sure, I send them friend requests after that, but it just goes to show how sad the situation is.
If I open up my page to be seen by known friends who I haven’t established as such, I also open up the page to the lurkers. Kind of defeats the purpose of trying to protect myself, doesn’t it?! Some of that is certainly not Facebook’s fault, however, most of it is a direct result of biz lurkers being allowed to join and make a “page” of their own, giving them the privilege of “following” anyone who is visible.
I’ve asked Facebook about a few things like this, in a well-written and fairly “non-accusative” tone.
Most of the time, they didn’t even reply. They did on one occasion, however, and completely failed to answer any one question directly, and instead filling the text with that same boilerplate nonsense we’ve all come to love so much à la Bell/government/etc.
I agree with Jon…
I’ve got nothing against a site making money off their efforts, but, that sentiment doesn’t include using me or my personal info, without my direct and informed consent, as a means to do this. And, it should treat the users with respect and be completely UP FRONT about its intentions. These are all things Facebook has failed miserably at.
And, if Zuckerbaby keeps up with this idea that he can claim “ownership” of anything his users put on the server, he’s gonna need to spend a helluva lot of money on lawyers in the very near future!