
Sheryl Sandberg: Want Privacy? Must Pay to Use FB - mudil
https://www.today.com/video/more-facebook-data-breaches-possible-sheryl-sandberg-says-on-today-1204254787587
======
dang
It looks like you rewrote the tutorial to editorialize. That's against the
site guidelines:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
mudil
She clearly says in the interview what my title says. But that's OK: HN/YC
being a supporter of startups seems to be too much in love with FB and Google,
the behemoths that keep the above mentioned startups from rising up and
allowing YC to profit like it should. Paradox to me...

~~~
dang
I believe you about the interview, but it isn't ok to cherry-pick one detail
from a piece and make that the title. That's a form of editorializing.

> HN/YC being a supporter of startups seems to be too much in love with FB and
> Google

I doubt most users would agree, after the onslaught of stories in the last few
weeks. You might be falling prey to this bias:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22hostile%20media%20effect%22...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22hostile%20media%20effect%22&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

(I don't mean that personally btw—it's one of the most common phenomena we see
here.)

------
teamhappy
"Mark has apologized and I know he is prepared to apologize in any situation".
That's pretty funny.

Anyway, the title is wrong. All she says is giving users the option to
completely opt-out of targeted advertising on their platform would be a payed
product.

There's a reason why Facebook and all the others don't offer paying for their
services. They want to be able to tell advertisers that they can reach X
amount of people. If X gets too small advertisers lose interest and they have
to charge paying customers more and so on. I guess at some point somebody did
a napkin calculation and decided it's not worth it.

~~~
mudil
Napkin calculation? Really?

~~~
drewmate
It's just an expression meaning they made a lot of assumptions (eg how much
people would pay, how many would pay, and at what point advertisers stopped
dropping out.) Obviously they never actually tested these assumptions,
presumably because their simple models indicated it would be disastrous for
the company.

While there may have been literal napkins involved, my money's on a whiteboard
or Excel. ;)

~~~
mudil
Let me just tell you, that unlike you, FB and Goog do not make assumptions,
especially a lot of assumptions.

~~~
teamhappy
You don't have to make a lot of assumptions to realize doing the math is a
waste of time. The group of people most likely to pay for services like
Facebook are 20-something year olds with some extra money to spend. That's a
group advertisers care very much about. If they're gone your customers (the
advertisers) aren't going to be happy.

Sure, at this point you could still hire some company to do phone surveys for
you trying to figure out how many of you users would be willing to pay and you
can make some kind of educated guess as to how that would affect advertising
revenue but why bother, really.

------
thisisit
FB's response to this whole thing is been terrible. Zuckerberg and Sandbberg
weren't seen for days. And now Sandberg comes out with the defense that
"Cambridge Analytica told us so we believed them. We are doing audits to
ensure everything is fine now."

And on top of this she even talks about how a privacy focused FB would be a
paid product.

I can't help but ask - Seriously? FB doesn't seem even remotely sorry for what
happened. Data Breach? Don't blame us, we had legal assurance. Privacy? Don't
blame us that will be a paid product.

~~~
krelian
What do you want them to say? That they are shutting down FB?

~~~
r00fus
Maybe they're doing something proactive to prevent the next exfiltration?
Something where they leave a bit of money on the table as a sign of good
faith?

Oh, we're talking FB. I'd sooner expect that behavior from GS first.

------
dpflan
How can you monetize your own data within these platforms? Is that a viable
alternative to a subscription?

1\. You can opt in to data sharing at $X/data or data event used in
analysis/ad profiling. This would pay for your free usage of FB and see ads.

2\. You can pay for a subscription at $Y/month and see no ads or analysis.

------
justherefortart
People will just move to the next free service. I guess facebook forgot they
mostly replaced classmates.com.

Eventually, a one will take off and won't sell. Facebook will become the next
MySpace. Not everyone wants to be bought out.

~~~
justboxing
> they mostly replaced classmates.com

No. They replaced the original friendster.com

~~~
justherefortart
Most people that started using facebook after it opened to everyone were older
people reconnecting with their past associates.

Since everyone was getting on the new "cool" facebook, and a lot of their kids
were already on it. Facebook replaced classmates.com, friendster, myspace,
xanga, and many others.

------
russellbeattie
Facebook makes around $5 per user per month [1] Fine, where do I enter my
credit card?

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/02/facebooks-revenue-
topped-5-p...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/02/facebooks-revenue-topped-5-per-
user-for-the-first-time.html)

------
throwaway2016a
I may be in the minority on HN but I for one would gladly pay Facebook say
$10/month for added privacy if all my friends were still there.

And if there is a free (subsidized by ads) version for people who don't want
to pay I bet you a lot of people will stay.

------
petraeus
alternative, i wont pay for fb and I also want privacy

~~~
z_
Indeed. This seems to be lost in the current conversation. What do we do about
the invasive practices of an entity upon individuals that are not their
customers and want nothing to do with the corporation.

