Can you elaborate on FB having direct impact on your life? I mean BMW has some impact on your life even if you don't drive them, but I'm guessing you have something more specific in mind.
Let's begin with shadow profiles of non users. Despite the fact that I didn't sign up they still store my data and track me.
Facebook being abused as a conduit to manipulate elections and as means for nefarious propaganda concerns all of us. You don't need to be a Facebook user to be directly impacted by the toxic effects of populism on society fostered by them
Further, it's a poison to society by allowing hate speech (but not pictures of breast feeding mothers) to be disseminated on a massive scale
As a human being it concerns me when Facebook is used to support genocide and to aid an abet the silencing of critics in countries like Cambodia or The Philippines
As a Jew I feel personally attacked when the highest echelons of the company blow the most vile, antisemtic dog whistles currently available
I believe that all those things (and much more) affects my life a lot more than people driving BMWs.
First one is interesting to me. Because if I ask you if you know X, do you think you are breaching his privacy if you told me that you do know X? What if I have a lot of time and ask that a lot of people? It seems to me that in many cases we are punishing entities that operate on publicly available data.
I like security mindset where if something is possible to know about you, you assume that somebody knows it. E.g. you can tell a lot by exact times of HN comments. Or by collecting and analysing data from multiple sources.
I don't like that thanks to street cameras or GPS your car can be very accurately tracked, but in my mind we kind of allowed that the moment we put visible unique registration numbers of cars (I know I'm pretty much alone on this one).
I have no idea where you got antisemitism from, but described problems seem to be mostly problems with society and not really specific to this medium. Some problems are difficult. What one considers a hate speech, somebody else can consider a freedom of speech. And vice versa.
Does it matter if it's Facebook or Orkut or VKontakte? Remember that just as you have some opinion about what policies should given company apply there are other people who have some strong opinion about completely different policies that should have been in place.
Personally, I don't care much whether FB allows pictures of breastfeeding mothers or not since I'm not a user. I also wouldn't even know whether it does - I don't like FB, so I ignore it and most news related to it.
You are being downvoted but I don't see any arguments against your points. I agree with the first point. With Instagram and WhatsApp, they have a reach much bigger than people who only have Facebook, and it is common knowledge that they build shadow profiles, in addition to other shady tactics such as using phone microphones to listen to conversations while the app is in the background, and keeping the app in the background by force by abusing audio APIs on iPhones.
Yeah, I noted that too. I learned that being downvoted based on good faith arguments (aka for an opinion) is actually a badge of honor.
Seems I hit home and somebody really, really doesn't like my reasoning and at least I hope to have made them uncomfortable with my arguments (best case I would have made them think, but I doubt it).
In the end: It's shame on them. In an apparently smart community clearly stated and honest opinions should never be downvoted, but I don't really see how it can be avoided. But in the end it's auto corrective anyway.
