

Is Facebook evil or merely incompetent?  - bhavin
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/101810-is-facebook-evil-or-merely.html

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rblion
I'd say Facebook is opportunistic more than anything. They know how badly
people can't sit still or be alone and they simply profit off that. Like
Tocqueville said 'people get the government they deserve.' This is what
happens when people don't think about how closely freedom, privacy, and
selfhood are linked. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

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sqrt17
Exactly. For social networking, people go to the big, nice-looking site that
all of their friends seem to like. It sells your grandmother on the slave
market? Oh, too bad, no one told me this!

I think Facebook has survived long enough in a very competitive market segment
that they can't claim to be stupid. They do care about privacy etc. - to the
extent that they need it to remain in the market, but not one ounce more, and
to some extent their business model (not charging their users, ever) means
they have to do scary stuff on the side (with all privacy implications) to
remain competitive with for-fee sites (e.g., Xing, LinkedIn) as well as sites
that are financed through generic advertising.

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neilk
At Facebook the motto is said to be "move fast and break things". I think that
explains pretty much everything about them, the good and the bad.

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qjz
Any sufficiently entrenched incompetence is indistinguishable from evil.

 _[Paraphrasing Arthur C. Clarke]_

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Natsu
I'm having a hard time buying that they're incompetent. I mean, we just had
all those stories about one of their biggest partners leaking data to
advertisers, then they go on to ban the practice and remove _other_ (far less
profitable) programs made by different companies from their systems and
pretend that we won't notice....

Now, it could be that they hired away the 10% of Google that's the least
competent, but I don't really buy that. And somebody ought to have noticed all
the news stories about selling Facebook data to advertisers.

So if they're "incompetent" it's because they're sticking their heads in the
sand.

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jfb
"The present king of France is bald."

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dasil003
Neither. Facebook has consistently pushed the privacy (or lack thereof)
envelope since they launched the newsfeed, and they have consistently profited
from it. The regular press backlash hasn't done shit to their bottom line, so
until the misstep that actually causes the general public to care (which could
come shockingly fast), they are simply a brilliant company.

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zabraxias
While I don't disagree with the author's points of discussion I do disagree
with the tone and attempt at humor. Sometimes even if you do have something
valid to say your words won't be sweeter by sitting on a bee hive.

