23
votes
“He Doesn’t Believe in It”: Mark Zuckerberg Has Never Cared About Your Privacy, and He’s Not Going to Change
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Authors
- Nick Bilton
- Published
- Nov 20 2018
- Word count
- 1261 words
They run a very tight ship. One of these days you feel there's just going to be a whistleblower who exposes all the ridiculous bullshit they've been doing for years and years and years and years
The same basic thing happened to me. I made the same decision as you.
Frankly, I am amazed that this is even legal still. Until you verify your identity, your account still exists and now you have no way to tell them to delete your account. Fuck Facebook, indeed.
I was recently laughed at that I had a fake Facebook account. Why in God's name would you ever tell the internet your identity? This was a lesson hardcoded into me since the early 90's when Bill Gates lamented the fact that the Internet is largely anonymous. That sold me. If Bill wants to know your identity in the 90's, no one can be trusted to know your identity. Ever.
Oddly enough. This is the 1st place I've ever used my real name. But it was time to take back devin after a Nazi gop asshat tried to sully our name.
Yeah, I don't understand how pseudo-anonymity is not even on the table when discussing many of the issues related to the internet. Like kids getting bullied online because their parents not even gave them the chance of not being on the internet with their real name and face easily available. I'm not sure how we've got to this point, but it doesn't look good.
Big shame this is the way the internet is going. The internet used to be seen as a sort of infinite library of information, not a money making scheme. I've recently gone on a big technology privacy binge. In other words, turning to FOSS and such. I mean, I'm no Stallman but I do what I can. Unfortunately, I have to keep Facebook for family and Instagram for friends. I at least have a tracker blocker and such but it's going to be impossible to keep everything from Facebook if you want to use it.
UBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, Cookie AutoDelete, and more are now must-haves for me online. Privacy Tools is also a great website with some privacy suggestions if you're interested, or feel free to ask me about some of this if you're curious.
I don't have a phone, unfortunately and I don't really like email. The group chats are all on instagram, unfortunately so instagram messaging through an android emulator is mostly the way I keep in touch. For the most part my family chooses to stay in contact through facebook messenger, and there's nothing I can do to change that.
I might be getting an android soon, and if so I can for the most part switch to texting friends, though I will keep around instagram for looking at photos and such, it's just hard to keep in good social standing without social media. If this happens I will probably delete my facebook for good.
Another good article with a very similar underlying sentiment was Why Mark Zuckerberg's 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn't Fixed Facebook
I think the core thing to recognize is that they're not going to care until their decisions and handling of them have some significant detrimental effects on the company. From their perspective, they've been disregarding privacy (and other) concerns and making half-hearted "we know we need to to better" apologies for the entire life of the site, but they've still been constantly rewarded with massive growth and revenue anyway. So why would they change anything?
Until there are some significant consequences in the form of users—or even more significantly, advertisers—abandoning Facebook and Instagram or some impactful fines or punishments, there's not much motivation for them to worry about it. It's hard to give much weight to arguments saying they're doing things poorly while they're objectively a massive success.