1/29/19: Senators ask Facebook why it tricked kids into spending parents’ money https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/senators-ask-facebook-why-it-tricked-kids-into-spending-parents-money/
“A new report from the Center for Investigative Reporting shows that your company had a policy of willful blindness toward credit card charges by children—internally referred to as ‘friendly fraud’—in order to boost revenue at the expense of parents,” US Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote in a letter to Zuckerberg today. “Notably, Facebook appears to have rejected a plan that would have effectively mitigated this risk and instead doubled down on maximizing revenue.” https://www.markey.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Game%20Payments.pdf
Facebook’s endless PR crises don’t appear to be hurting its bottom line.
The company posted a record $6.9 billion profit for the final three months of 2018 — a jump of 61% from the same period a year earlier and well ahead of Wall Street estimates.
Facebook’s revenue for the quarter rose 30% to $16.9 billion, according to its latest earnings report released Wednesday. https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/30/tech/facebook-earnings-q4/index.html
“As Long as Mark Zuckerberg Thinks Facebook Is the Internet, He’ll Never Be Sorry” (Gizmodo) https://gizmodo.com/as-long-as-mark-zuckerberg-thinks-facebook-is-the-inter-1832339318 “…Reading Zuckerberg’s latest communique from the Facebook War Room feels a little like going back in time. Over the last two years, the company has faced more public outrage and political pressure than in its entire history, and it’s delivered a commensurate volume of apologies in turn. The apologies just breeze right over our heads because we’ve been hearing them for 15 years. These days, Facebook is best known for losing control of millions of users data, getting hacked, surveilling kids who are arguably too young to truly consent to such a thing, and being an exceptional tool for disseminating political propaganda. It’s also known for providing incredible breeding grounds for mob violence in India and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. The list of bad marks on Facebook’s record is huge and you’re probably familiar with a lot of it.” (see links)
“UK lawmakers have accused Facebook of violating data privacy and competition laws in a report on social media disinformation that also says CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed “contempt” toward parliament by not appearing before them.” https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/17/tech/facebook-fake-news-disinformation-report/index.html
“The UK Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee said in a report published Monday that a trove of internal Facebook emails it reviewed demonstrated that the social media platform had “intentionally and knowingly” violated both data privacy and competition laws.
The cache of documents reviewed by the committee [link], some of which include correspondence between Zuckerberg and company executives, stem from a lawsuit filed in California against Facebook (FB). The committee obtained the documents late last year from a small app company called Six4Three that is behind the suit.”
See also Business Insider report https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-humiliated-by-damian-collins-committee-2019-2 – includes link to “The most explosive moments from Facebook’s hearing, where furious lawmakers tore into ‘frat-boy billionaire’ Mark Zuckerberg” (Nov. 28, 2018).
Zuckerberg Wants Facebook to Build a Mind-Reading Machine (Wired 3/7/19) https://www.wired.com/story/zuckerberg-wants-facebook-to-build-mind-reading-machine/
“Zuckerberg explained the potential benefits of the technology this way when he announced Facebook’s research in 2017: “Our brains produce enough data to stream 4 HD movies every second. The problem is that the best way we have to get information out into the world—speech—can only transmit about the same amount of data as a 1980s modem. We’re working on a system that will let you type straight from your brain about 5x faster than you can type on your phone today. Eventually, we want to turn it into a wearable technology that can be manufactured at scale. Even a simple yes/no ‘brain click’ would help make things like augmented reality feel much more natural.”
Needless to say Mr. Zuckerberg’s track record concerning access to personal information and individual privacy isn’t reassuring, for instance: “Five paragraphs into the monster blog post that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published yesterday afternoon, he makes a damning, strangely understated admission: “frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services.” https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/7/18253547/facebook-zuckerberg-future-blog-post-redefining-reputation
See also “The Right to Privacy” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Privacy_(article)
Wah wah wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. 😁
Mark Zuckerberg has a net worth of about $56 billion, making him the eighth-richest person in the world.
“Mark Zuckerberg’s WSJ op-ed was a message to would-be regulators: Hands off our ad business” (recode Jan 26, 2019) https://www.recode.net/2019/1/26/18197883/mark-zuckerberg-wsj-regulation-messaging-monopoly
Nikhil Sonnad (Quartz January 25, 2019): “Today (Jan 25), the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Mark Zuckerberg. It’s called “The Facts About Facebook” (paywall). Like any op-ed written by a corporate executive, it has its own version of “the facts,” and presents the best-case scenario for Facebook. I have rewritten it to present the worst-case scenario. You decide which is closer to the truth.” https://qz.com/1533961/mark-zuckerbergs-op-ed-edited-to-show-facebooks-worst-case-scenario/
1/29/19: Senators ask Facebook why it tricked kids into spending parents’ money https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/senators-ask-facebook-why-it-tricked-kids-into-spending-parents-money/
“A new report from the Center for Investigative Reporting shows that your company had a policy of willful blindness toward credit card charges by children—internally referred to as ‘friendly fraud’—in order to boost revenue at the expense of parents,” US Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote in a letter to Zuckerberg today. “Notably, Facebook appears to have rejected a plan that would have effectively mitigated this risk and instead doubled down on maximizing revenue.” https://www.markey.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Game%20Payments.pdf
Facebook’s endless PR crises don’t appear to be hurting its bottom line.
The company posted a record $6.9 billion profit for the final three months of 2018 — a jump of 61% from the same period a year earlier and well ahead of Wall Street estimates.
Facebook’s revenue for the quarter rose 30% to $16.9 billion, according to its latest earnings report released Wednesday. https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/30/tech/facebook-earnings-q4/index.html
“The real lesson of Facebook’s Apple dust-up shows why Zuckerberg’s ‘hacker way’ is even more dangerous than we thought” https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-research-apple-onavo-dispute-regulators-antitrust-monopoly-privacy-2019-2
See also https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/
Mark Zuckerberg on his 15-year Facebook anniversary https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10106411140260321
“As Long as Mark Zuckerberg Thinks Facebook Is the Internet, He’ll Never Be Sorry” (Gizmodo) https://gizmodo.com/as-long-as-mark-zuckerberg-thinks-facebook-is-the-inter-1832339318 “…Reading Zuckerberg’s latest communique from the Facebook War Room feels a little like going back in time. Over the last two years, the company has faced more public outrage and political pressure than in its entire history, and it’s delivered a commensurate volume of apologies in turn. The apologies just breeze right over our heads because we’ve been hearing them for 15 years. These days, Facebook is best known for losing control of millions of users data, getting hacked, surveilling kids who are arguably too young to truly consent to such a thing, and being an exceptional tool for disseminating political propaganda. It’s also known for providing incredible breeding grounds for mob violence in India and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. The list of bad marks on Facebook’s record is huge and you’re probably familiar with a lot of it.” (see links)
How Facebook Has Changed Computing (Wired 2/4/19) https://www.wired.com/story/how-facebook-has-changed-computing/
“UK lawmakers have accused Facebook of violating data privacy and competition laws in a report on social media disinformation that also says CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed “contempt” toward parliament by not appearing before them.” https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/17/tech/facebook-fake-news-disinformation-report/index.html
“The UK Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee said in a report published Monday that a trove of internal Facebook emails it reviewed demonstrated that the social media platform had “intentionally and knowingly” violated both data privacy and competition laws.
The cache of documents reviewed by the committee [link], some of which include correspondence between Zuckerberg and company executives, stem from a lawsuit filed in California against Facebook (FB). The committee obtained the documents late last year from a small app company called Six4Three that is behind the suit.”
See also Business Insider report https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-humiliated-by-damian-collins-committee-2019-2 – includes link to “The most explosive moments from Facebook’s hearing, where furious lawmakers tore into ‘frat-boy billionaire’ Mark Zuckerberg” (Nov. 28, 2018).
Zuckerberg Wants Facebook to Build a Mind-Reading Machine (Wired 3/7/19) https://www.wired.com/story/zuckerberg-wants-facebook-to-build-mind-reading-machine/
“Zuckerberg explained the potential benefits of the technology this way when he announced Facebook’s research in 2017: “Our brains produce enough data to stream 4 HD movies every second. The problem is that the best way we have to get information out into the world—speech—can only transmit about the same amount of data as a 1980s modem. We’re working on a system that will let you type straight from your brain about 5x faster than you can type on your phone today. Eventually, we want to turn it into a wearable technology that can be manufactured at scale. Even a simple yes/no ‘brain click’ would help make things like augmented reality feel much more natural.”
Needless to say Mr. Zuckerberg’s track record concerning access to personal information and individual privacy isn’t reassuring, for instance: “Five paragraphs into the monster blog post that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published yesterday afternoon, he makes a damning, strangely understated admission: “frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services.” https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/7/18253547/facebook-zuckerberg-future-blog-post-redefining-reputation
See also “The Right to Privacy” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Privacy_(article)