Hacker News Reader

Comment by epoch_100 | Hacker News Reader

I can never really understand Facebook's approach to dealing with legal pressure surrounding its privacy practices.

Increased data privacy regulation could be an existential threat to Facebook's business model—but instead of trying to make a positive impression of itself by cooperating with lawmakers (and potentially helping to shape the regulation itself in the process), it misleads and stonewalls.[0]

What's Facebook's long-term plan here? Do they think they will be able to fend off governments forever and eventually become supranational?

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-misled-parliament-on-d...

View on HN

At this point Mark Zuckerberg's identity is Facebook. He has never had another job, he never took a humanities class, he never did study abroad, he never spent a summer with normal people working a normal job. His entire life is Facebook. They are one and the same.

Try to imagine your whole identity being tied up in this massive company you made. He has no option but to fight as hard as he can, any talk of regulation is an existential threat to Mark himself.

He has never shown a shred of regret or pause about the past mistakes of the company, it has been full steam ahead ignore the haters at all costs since the Beacon fiasco. Nothing is going to change this company unless an external force comes in and makes the change happen in spite of Mark Zuckerberg.

Maybe the goal is to make complying with the regulation so cumbersome (but ultimately ineffective) that competitors, who aren't already large and profitable, have no way of entering the social media market? They can have their cake and eat it too... oh we'd so love to prevent "horrible thing" from happening again, but you know the government won't let us ;^)

bingo the oh lets do the MS App api strategy in new form

>>>...to fend off governments forever and eventually become supranational?

No, but they can fight to delay the inevitable. Increased privacy rules hurts profits. Pushing back regulation by a year or two, or even a month or two, means keeping those profit going for a month or two. For an entity like facebook that could mean millions. Say a new privacy reg will require them spinning up a few hundred employees to manage the compliance project. Holding off on those hires saves more money than the legal fees spent avoiding regulators. Even when you know you will eventually have to do something unprofitable, every day you avoid having to do it is a win.

They can always just ensure people who like them get elected. Facebook has a significant influence on elections now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com