Zuckerberg Seeks Personal Privacy, Then Removes Online Privacy Feature
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Doesn't it seem like we're conflating 2 really different definitions of privacy here? One being online, on facebook, and the other offline, at home. This doesn't seem ironic at all, we're talking about one person's decision to do something that he thinks will make his life better vs. a corporation's decision to try and make more money.
(I'm in no way defending Facebook here, just seems silly to think these 2 things are at all really related. It's like saying Ronald McDonald at a vegetable and it's ironic McDonalds just introduced a triple giant bacon burger or something)
Anyway, we should really make something out of the frustration we feel over getting our privacy rights trampled upon by the likes of Facebook. What can we do to bring it down? Make privacy-oriented alternative networking sites? Maybe ones that operate on a pay-model, so there isn't a grotesque incentive to violate basic rights? Or maybe tell Facebook to buckle down and change direction in favor of the common user's interests?
But the two things together can make us think about the privacy issue.. the thing is, we all need privacy, and need to have control of it.. thats what we value in real life..
In the virtual life front we dont have that sort of control, we need to obey whatever they think we should do.. we dont have the control.. that is the irony when we compare how much we can control privacy in real life vs. in virtual life.. and in the virtual case; who really controls it, is a corporation.. they dont allow us to control our own privacy.. Once you adopt their social networks its not harsh or ilusory to say they control us more than we think
It might not change your mind about any irony, but it's certainly worth mentioning.
It's his company, and he can do what he wants. Your opinions are insignificant to him. We as a society need to start learning how to deal with this, accept our place in the food chain, and obey those more fortunate. We created Zuckerberg ourselves by collectively choosing to use Facebook to regulate our social lives; we must now accept the consequences and embrace the loss of our rights.
Zuckerberg will forever win, and you will forever lose. He will own you for the entire duration of your life. You won't enjoy it, and neither will I, but it is a fact as immutable as the human condition itself.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine Zuckerberg's boot stamping on a human face - forever.
The fact that this is making news at all is silly. This is business as usual for Facebook and business as usual for a billionaire. FB doesn't care about your privacy and a rich guy bought some houses. I'm shocked!
> It's his company, and he can do what he wants.
In any country, this is of course only true to the extent that he follows the applicable laws. In Europe, these laws are increasingly including provisions about data privacy. Therefore Facebook's attitude towards data privacy is not solely up to him, but also restrained by the democratic process.
How effective this will be remains to be seen, admittedly.
My post was partly sarcastic, but I was trying to illustrate just how little the opinions of 95% matter to "winners", i.e. powerful magnates and people who own entire industries.
Facebook is a publicly held company. Mark Zuckerberg has less than 30% of its shares.
> We created Zuckerberg ourselves by collectively choosing to use Facebook to regulate our social lives
And people will let it until they lose trust in Facebook or if an alternative comes along that serves their needs better. AOL, Friendster, and MySpace came before, they screwed up, and are insignificant now.
And anyway, I've always thought that the title 'publicly held company' is a bit of a misnomer. The word 'public' (to some people) almost implies a connotation of public interest and true public ownership... when the reality of it is actually the opposite in a lot of cases.
Their entire premise is "We're smarter than the rest of the world and you poor people can't be trusted with the big important decisions of us billionaires." This is social media on the internet after all—the most important advancement in humanity's collective history.
I will admit, though, that the HN crowd probably already knew these particular arguments were false, so perhaps the value of this link on this particular site is somewhat diminished.
> We as a society need to start learning how to deal with this, accept our place in the food chain, and obey those more fortunate.
This struck me as incredibly anti-market. Since when should any free market actor "accept" her place? Fuck that. If you don't like the way things are "change the world"! Isn't that what Silicon Valley does? I mean, the world usually ends up just as lousy as it was when things got started, but it sure is different! To me, there is no reason to think that Zuckerberg and Facebook will be unassailable for decades to come, to believe this would be to ignore the entire history of computing.
As you said, the world usually ends "just as lousy" as before when things change. By lousy I mean that there will be a strict hierarchy of a few unimaginably powerful people exercising their will over the rest. Whether it's in a libertarian's wet dream or in the most claustrophobic dictatorial society, this will always be true. The average standard of living improves over time but the distribution remains the same. It's inevitable.
Let's say you hate Facebook and its privacy violations. What can you do about it? Nothing at all. You may try to stage protests or send angrily worded letters to your representative, but at the end of the day, to people like Zuckerberg you will be the equivalent of a pesky bug, soon squished and forgotten. So go ahead and impress me! Change the world. You might think, "What about those people who didn't give up their dreams and changed history in the process?" Well, unless you are lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and armed with the right idea, it's extremely unlikely that you will have any impact at all on the world; hard work will never be enough. I want to change society as well, and I am constantly on the lookout for an opportunity to do so, but I also try to keep my expectations grounded in reality. I know I am not a protagonist according to whose life the story of the species evolves. It's highly possible, though not certain, that my life will be insignificant. I keep hoping it won't, but life isn't fiction and there are limits. I keep the glimmer of hope alive but I am fully aware that it emits only a pale light.
tl;dr Stop being outraged about the hypocrisy of powerful people and don't convince yourself that you have the moral high ground; you will only hurt yourself. Might makes right.
I trust this was dark humour.
On the offchance that it was meant seriously, try reading some history. Especially European, and especially in the period 1914 to 1945.
Over the subsequent decades, many of those were sold off and turned into -- often quite nice -- housing... well, "tracts", doesn't really fit. Nor does "sub-division"; the use of that word came later and also does not connote the upper scale nature many of these areas.
(Hey, as I suddenly recall, my home is more modest and is not located in the heart of the area I'm thinking of, but I live on what was formerly a substantial country estate of one of these magnates.)
Anyway, my point is, the trend for several decades has been that old estates have been broken up into smaller units. Sometimes, a smaller "core" of the estate remains as an actual estate, perhaps even in the original family, but land-wise, people have "downscaled".
Now... We in the U.S. appear to on the verge of having a new round of estate creation. Gilded age, indeed.
Not entirely about privacy.
That's the official line, it may not be entirely true. Although super rich, he still has the "I wear a hoodie" shtick so he might have felt his average guy rep going down if seen as buying 4-5 houses to build a bigger one.
Zuckerberg Pays $30 Million For Personal Privacy, Then Removes Online Privacy Feature.
The evil twins, Google and FB, got almost nothing on me because I rarely post and use them from a separate browser.
I guess the original headline "Rich guy in big house doesn't want close neighbors" didn't generate enough Internet Outrage (tm).