This is getting so ridiculous, I really dislike how Facebook is using the issues of late as a way to "reeducate" people on how it's ok to be doing what it's doing. It's not ok, and not acceptable.
It's a shame we've allowed a web to be built which allows for this kind of exploitation.
I'm also acutely aware that it's not just Facebook.
I'm not entirely convinced that if we had a chance to do it over that we wouldn't just repeat the same mistakes. Are there other massively profitable businesses that are free to users without some form of exploitation? Advertising and the industry that surrounds it is absolutely tainted as they chase analytics to make each set of eyeballs most profitable to themselves. How do we get "free" services while also having great privacy control in a way that the company can operate at a scale like Google or Facebook?
> The simple (and inevitable) solution is to break up Facebook.
There was a time when anti monopoly laws were taken seriously. That you are the number one social network should not be used to also become a big player on advertising, selling items, casual games, etc.
Letting companies leverage on a monopoly to gain other markets is dangerous for the economy.
> There was a time when anti monopoly laws were taken seriously
Over the past century, economists came up with a measure of firm concentration called the HH Index [1]. The HH Index is "the sum of the squares of the market shares of the firms within the industry (sometimes limited to the 50 largest firms)". (It's derived from the Simpson ecological diversity index.)
Market share is a measure on customers. The DoJ used the HH Index to measure monopolies because monopoly power was understood to result from excessive market share. The case of non-paying consumers was never legally considered.
TL; DR More than apathy explains the delays in bringing antitrust action against Facebook.
> The case of non-paying consumers was never legally considered.
Is there an already-available analogous quantity to market share here? Or do you have thoughts about what might be used?
BTW, it's interesting that the HH index uses sum of squares to measure concentration of the distribution, where something like the Shannon entropy seems more natural -- although, "seems more natural" is subjective I suppose.
I only add the latter because it's separate enough already, and you can now sign up "without" a pre-existing fb account.
Is it similar in function to WhatsApp? Yep, but if we split the company along product lines Messenger should be considered a suitable product.
Having worked in ad-tech for a while, and dealt with cookie matchers and retargeting -- I'm actually surprised to the degree to which companies keep pursuing this stuff .. because it wasn't clear to me from the statistics that it was actually effective.
I was involved in the relatively early days of this, so probably techniques have improved. But I worked for a startup that was doing search retargeting, among other things, and when I ran the numbers I just didn't see a huge increase in click-through rates. The data just wasn't there.
Like I said, I'm sure techniques have improved. But I still continually see ads retargeted to me that are both creepy and ineffective. Marketing me things I've already bought. Or lost interest in. I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen an ad based on retargeting that I thought "oh yeah I should pursue that."
Eh. We should want innovation - to "let a thousand flowers bloom". But when companies start getting so big they are a detriment to society in some way, we should regulate them.
We let train and oil companies do their thing in the late 1800s - which helped society. And when they got too big and damaging in the early 1900s, we regulated them. We're on the same course again, I think.
It's a shame we've allowed a web to be built which allows for this kind of exploitation.
I'm also acutely aware that it's not just Facebook.