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Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

I for one do not expect Facebook to change much unless there's a big shakeup from the top, including removing Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and others. What they have shown repeatedly is contempt for their users in the guise of apologies and remediations that go nowhere. Since such a shakeup is unlikely to happen, the other thing that could happen is a breaking up of the company, which I'm guessing (this is not a prediction) will happen in a couple of years. To start with, Instagram and WhatsApp would have to get unwound from this mess by becoming individual and unrelated services.

I don't have a lot of hope on social media platforms respecting user privacy and avoid massive data collection and/or sharing. Privacy in today's world is for the privileged people, in various ways.

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I don't believe there is much synergies between FB and Instead anyway, and even less so with WhatsApp which seemed to be have been bought out strictly to stop it from growing into its own social network.

But I don't see the US ever breaking up FB in the coming decade, as the agenda is clearly not to fight monopolies and trusts.

Any breakup, if it were to happen, would be likely to be triggered mainly by the EU, IMO. For all the complexities that EU regulations sometimes bring in, I see the EU as the only hope in such cases.

When has the EU ever break up a world class monopoly ?

When has the EU ever produced a world class monopoly?

Maybe this time is when? I don't know. But I personally don't have hopes on any other government or governments to take such an action.

Change means less revenue, IMO. Their business model is to keep squeezing every bit of data and seize every opportunity for the next quarter. So, that type of change will happen only if forced.

I've said it before: FB should not have been allowed to buy them in the first place.

OR, the people who made Facebook interesting will go elsewhere. I've received a few invites to email lists, and one to a private blog, to replace the authors' Facebook posts.

At least try to understand what is going on before regurgitating all your confirmation biases against Facebook. These device APIs were a necessity before iOS and Android came along. How do you think you got FB experience on Blackberry before they had an app store?

Pretty sad piece by NYTimes who are just trying to get views and probably have an agenda against FB (given how much FB is ravaging their business model).

This is FB's response: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/06/why-we-disagree-with-th...

The device APIs are not just "before iOS and Android came along". And they have remained and alive for a lot longer than they were supposed to be. That much is clear both from the NYTimes report (though it did lack clarity and could've been much better) and from Facebook's own response. Where is the statement that billions of devices (including older ones) out there don't have this access any longer?

Facebook will not be the same without the masterminds (Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and others). Practically, the business there is all about finding monetary value of the user data.

Whether very few of us like that or not, we keep going back to using Facebook anyway, how (long) can we avoid the platform where our family and friends (and billions of other mindless users) are?

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