Some clarification from one of the programmers (2003)
slashdot.org
slashdot.org
Zuckerberg's only other comment on Slashdot: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=61425&cid=5774262
> We hope to use massive amounts of data to aid in analysis, but your individual data will never be seen by anyone else.
It means no one will look at your individual data, but it means nothing about aggregated data. In fact they are definitely saying that they are going to use your personal data "for analysis". And I believe it is what, for example, Facebook is doing.
People at Facebook won't look at your individual data, there are billions of users, they have other things to do than to look at your boring profile, and I believe there are company policies in place that prevent employees from actively looking at the few "less boring" profiles. They work on a large scale, using bots, is is more along the lines of "what to show people who use the word "dog" a lot, in order to maximize revenue".
That sounds almost nice, until you realize you can substitute "dog" for other words like "qanon", "chemtrails", etc., and the long hand of Facebook reaches a significant part of the Internet even when you're not visiting Facebook.
I read the "vow" as a promise to collect massive amounts of data.
As for the project - "Zuckerberg and friend Adam D’Angelo created an MP3 player that would keep track of every song the user played on a computer and, as it learned what the user liked, would begin to make playlists." https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/10/23/not-so-artific...
The lesson here ( again and again.. ) is to give little importance of what people say, even if they really mean it. Also study the past and most of these conversations would be avoided altogether.
Slashdot had a feature where you could designate certain other Slashdot users as your friends -- and until you implemented it, there was just some default/placeholder text on your profile. That's also true in this case, but the intervening years have given it some irony.
"Mark Zuckerberg (667482) is all alone in the world."
https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-im...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...
ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
ZUCK: just ask
ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don’t know why
ZUCK: they “trust me”
ZUCK: dumb fucks