
Facebook’s Privacy Cake - gmishuris
https://stratechery.com/2019/facebooks-privacy-cake/
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chillacy
A good analysis. Traditionally I haven’t seen many in depth articles in the
social space, mostly emotional reactions or people severely misunderstanding
product positioning because they don’t personally use it (2 years ago this was
Snap). And even if they are a user, most people have a hard time articulating
the value proposition of a free social product.

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yuy910616
well stratechery is your site lol. Ben Thompson is one of the best at doing
exactly what you described.

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farisjarrah
Dont forget about his podcast Exponent where he frequently expands on his
weekly stratechery articles. Good stuff.

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devoply
Could FB do it? Yes. Are people stupid enough to buy it? Probably. Are they
going to actually deliver what they are claiming? Hell no. Zuck will suck up
any communications in his platforms and store it forever and make it available
to various governments to spy on people and for corporations to exploit for
profit. Nutters will continue to rile up other nutters privately but it will
be more difficult to point your finger at FB.

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atoav
Facebook has indeed not shown to be truthful in any way. And rhis is far
beyond a small mishap where they hired the wrong person for the wrong spot and
managed to deal with it for now. A beliveable transformation of their
corporate culture would take _a lot_ — starting with a resignation and a self-
denunciation of Mark Zuckerberg himself.

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mercer
or at the very least some kind of independent check/audit.

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basicplus2
Clearly this was not taking the Zuckster seriously.. it was clearly sarcasm...

< Another set took Zuckerberg entirely too seriously:

I am not a stock market person but the fact that Facebook’s stock hardly
budged on a day that Mark Zuckerberg said he planned to pivot the company to a
totally untested new business model seems odd to me

— Casey Newton >

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dreamcompiler
Evil company says it's not going to be evil any more. And they really, really
mean it this time. Honest.

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JohnFen
They didn't really say that, though. I couldn't help but notice that
Zuckerberg's essay didn't even mention, let alone address, some of the largest
privacy problems with Facebook at all.

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zecg
That idea is what Google+ overcomplicated and underdelivered. And sadly, it's
also what Friendfeed was before facebook bought and snuffed it.

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reitanqild
> That idea is what Google+ overcomplicated and underdelivered.

People keep saying things along those lines.

Based on the number of healthy non-it-specialist communities I saw (that still
stay there as long as possible) I don't think that is the explanation, except
if you mean the initial launch.

My explanation is a giant PR mistake where they tried to push a botched
identity consolidation at the same time and with the same name as their social
network.

Ironically they later came back and fixed the identity problems and usability
wise it became one of the better ones IMO. (I'm talking about keeping
different groups of people separate, not protecting against TLA agencies.)

In the end we should probably be happy: they could have owned social
networking in addition to mail and search.

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yogthos
Facebook and Google will continue to be privacy nightmares unless their
business models change fundamentally.

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WA
tl;dr: Facebook plans to focus more on "privacy" in its marketing. Nothing
changes about the data collection from a technical/product point of view.
Question is whether people will believe that Facebook now is a privacy-focused
company or not.

