The problem is that "bad behavior" is a concept in flux. Facebook never hid what their business model was: sell your personal data to third parties. Only a few privacy activists were concerned. Others reactions went from "meh" to "it's actually smart!" (Remember when Obama's campaign was praised for its innovative approach profiling voters?).
It took Cambridge Analytica for people to realize that they did not want this.
I have been paranoid about Facebook since day one, but there is something I won't do: blame them for coming up with a business model that is legal and did not seem to concern users ethically either.
The hearings of Zuckberg have been shameful. As much as I love seeing him on the grill, I have more contempt for the lawmakers in front of him, who actually enabled Facebook to become such a monster by either facilitating or simply not understanding what it was doing.
Facebook is a problem, but the ones responsible for this situation are not to be found within the company.
>I have more contempt for the lawmakers in front of him, who actually enabled Facebook to become such a monster by either facilitating or simply not understanding what it was doing.
Does your contempt extend to the billions of non-technical minded users who also did not understand what FB was doing?
Not really. The notion that the non-technical should understand EULAS dozens of pages long is a total fiction (that is legally binding in the US but not so much in saner countries).
On thousands of issues that can put several things I hold dear at risk, I just trust elected officials to do the right call. It is THEIR job to understand these issues and take the correct stance. I mean, this is literally what they are paid for.
I still wish that privacy had been a bigger concern to the population at large, but thanks to recent scandals, and to EU laws, this starts being the case.
> The problem is that "bad behavior" is a concept in flux. Facebook never hid what their business model was: sell your personal data to third parties.
So not to interrupt the outrage mob here ... but facebook did not sell data to these companies. And actually I'm not aware of any case where people are outraged where facebook sold peoples data, including the Kogan case.
Obama's campaign obtained users' consent before reading their friends' data. They did not, however, obtain the consent of those friends in any way, and at least for the 2012 campaign it was those friends who they were trying to convince to vote for Obama.
It took Cambridge Analytica for people to realize that they did not want this.
I have been paranoid about Facebook since day one, but there is something I won't do: blame them for coming up with a business model that is legal and did not seem to concern users ethically either.
The hearings of Zuckberg have been shameful. As much as I love seeing him on the grill, I have more contempt for the lawmakers in front of him, who actually enabled Facebook to become such a monster by either facilitating or simply not understanding what it was doing.
Facebook is a problem, but the ones responsible for this situation are not to be found within the company.
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