Zuckerberg removed a line about monitoring private messages from his manifesto

Zuckerberg was a creeper, if you look at what he did initially with Facebook and people's information who trusted him with that information, you can tell what his basic operating premises are. And they are anti-social. He never has cared for what people might think of him or fb, as long as they keep using it. And so I think that's Zuck's deep insight into people, anti-social behavior does not matter. People are stupid and they will keep using the platform anyway. Regardless of the total and complete lack of privacy and social skills.

If he can detect bullying where people are afraid to report it. Then going forward with the authoritarian shit happening in government, what's next? Hear people verbally fighting and report that to the police. Hear kids getting yelled at and report it to the police as child abuse. Disputes and altercations are always reported to the police. The walls have ears. All this is possible with FB. It's a surveillance nightmare as bad as anything Orwell could've prophesied and yet people continue to use FB.

And Googles version is probably much more successful. I noticed the same with Facebook and I don't think it's very effective. Talk once about a topic or like a page and you'll see related ads for a long time. Google seems to have smarter algorithms that try to detect a trend to figure out if you're really interested in something or just mentioned it once.

Not to mention, with google I actually get something out of it. Instant search for my flight info (even my Google home knows about it) is still my favorite thing.

Seems like the ice climbing lesson ads were very relevant and something you might actually be interested in?

Islamist groups get shut down on Facebook all the time.

There is a difference between sharia groups and extremists. They are not at all the same.

One group ponders on the implifications and simplifications of rules, and how they can follow it with ease.

While extremists try to take the most painful interpretation of rules and use demagogue speech to enforce it.

That's WhatsApp, but I doubt it applies to Facebook Messenger.

Going on a tangent. I don't like Facebook as a company due to its policies. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if one of these days the WhatsApp end-to-end encryption is "discovered" as broken, followed by a quick scramble to explain it was a temporary glitch and that they found it quickly and closed it. It would just make the headlines for a day or two and then be forgotten. Most people using WhatsApp never cared about any kind of encryption or thought a lot about privacy, and most people using it now still don't.

Whatsapp is from whatsapp inc, founded by two former yahoo emplyees, then facebook bought for 19 billions dollar. Very different from "being from facebook".

You can probably trust whatsapp end to end encryption as much as you can trust facebook to protect your privacy [1][2].

[1]: https://www.ghacks.net/2017/01/13/whatsapp-security-make-thi... [2]: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/israeli-firm-allegedly-selling-spy-...

> WhatsApp is from Facebook and it implements the Signal protocol which offers end-to-end encryption

You have no way to know what is actually running on their servers.

Well, Whatsapp does have an app on your phone that can read your decrypted messages

Right, in an effort not to appear as though they are editorializing legitimate news stories for one side or the other via what appears in the trending news section, they threw the baby out with the bath water. Fake news is not legitimate news. It's a form of spam. They did nothing to remove this spam once they got rid of the human editors. So the trending news section went from left leaning legitimate news stories under human editors to a bunch of spam. Now they want to use automated methods to police your private messages when they couldn't be bothered to figure out an automated method to remove spam from their trending news section when it really mattered.

This maybe true, but the mechanics of it escape me?

Many fake news sites were destination sites which carried ads. It seems unlikely that the margin on that traffic would have been enough to pay for significant Facebook traffic.

The version of this play which I've heard was:

- Create fake "news" site with outrageous stories.

- Cover it with ads (from Google and others)

- Seed it in Facebook groups

- Rely on organic reach to generate traffic.

I maybe wrong about the ability to to arbitrage on this traffic. If anyone has numbers I'd love to see them.

For a while there it was headline news every time a breastfeeding mother got censored.

I know I was having difficulties sharing a link to porn video. I was using private message, but it didn't let me to send the damn link.

> While Facebook is very successful, there's little vision in it now, compared to earlier. Most of the connected world is already on Facebook (if it's not blocked in their country). And while VR is nice, it's unlikely that it could attract a billion users anytime soon (esp because of cost).

Facebook could always give away VR headsets for free (disguised similar to the Free Basics program). Facebook has already run out of space to put ads on the Facebook platform, and so it has started trials on Messenger (in a couple of countries). One way to put ads everywhere is to install large screens (like in Sci-Fi movies or like those in Times Square). Another way is to give a small screen to people that's always in front of them and put ads there based on what the person is looking at, the location, time of day and other factors - that's what VR, or rather AR, will be about whenever Facebook gets serious about it (in relation to Wall Street and earnings). Google Glass probably had the same long term intent in mind when it was developed.

> ...and he'd only have to find a CEO for Facebook to...

He already has a CEO: Sheryl is more than capable of running the business. Sure, she'd need a tech-visionnaire CTO (like a Jony Ivy for her Tim Cook-style), but I think FB would be perfectly fine without Mark.

>> people mostly like him

I think that depends on geography and demographics. He's popular in SV and the tech community, but perhaps not as popular elsewhere. It's hard to find objective data on it. The only thing I could find was a silly cbinsights bracket vote. [1] It would be interesting to see what his Q score is.

[1] https://www.cbinsights.com/research-tech-ceos

I haven't seen it myself, but I have seen it on TV in a reality show based on the real-life activities of the US and Canadian customs and immigration agencies. It is standard procedure when they are questioning someone they suspect of entering the country for work (but stating they are visiting as a tourist) to ask to see their phone SMS message history. In the show they often find messages from their friends saying "good luck at the job interview tomorrow dude" and the like.

But would it really be hard to have checks for that kind of groups automatically?

How can Facebook read all of my private chat message, find out what the conversation was about and serve me accurate ads, but can't find out that this group called "death to all jew" is hate speech?

Oh wait, the first case brings in money and the second simply makes the world a better place.

My pessimistic guess is that end-to-end encryption will be removed from WhatsApp, Allo, etc., in a matter of time with flowery language like, "...to provide the best possible experience that our users expect and deserve, and to empower our users with choice, we're switching the default (to quick plaintext communications)...the communication will still be secure through encryption on the network from client to server to client."

Then it'll become like Messenger, where end-to-end encryption is an explicit choice (similar to Secret Chats in Telegram). Not that people using WhatsApp would really care. The stickiness factor is quite high.