Sure. And former Google CEO Eric Schmidt famously remarked on the subject of privacy, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Whatever you think of the people, corporations are not people and their behaviour is only partially directed by them. The most reliable predictor of their direction is their bottom line, and the intelligence of the people they hire to improve it.
Bear in mind that Google was so self-aware of the abuse potential of their position that they adopted "Don't be evil" as a corporate motto - until they dropped it on the grounds that it was underspecified, which strikes me as a quintessential example of corporate amoralism - evil, if you will.
Personally - I'm very aware that both track people obsessively, and I don't really go in for cheerleading US megacorps. However - Facebook feels a lot more evil to me.
It's the constant cat and mouse game. I go in periodically to tighten my security settings and close off more notifications, and they find new vectors to spam me into coming back into their walled garden. Their "frictionless sharing" always feels more like "frictionless privacy betrayal", as it's totally in their interest to disseminate whatever info they can gain as widely as possible. To blur the line between private and public for their benefit.
I don't close my account completely, because I go in once a year to thank people for the birthday greets. They find 21st century AOL more convenient for this than email.
In contrast, I'm one of those oddballs who still uses Google+. Almost exclusively with remote family, to share photos that we've taken during the week to talk about during a hangout. The default sharing "circle" is limited to close family, and that works well.
Feels like a pretty different experience from FB to me.
Plus, I think FB's aggressive cultivation of online relationships erodes old meatspace ones. It's human nature that just casually swiping on your smartphone screen for a status refresh and dopamine hit from your sofa is going to be easier than arranging to meet groups of friends in person. I've certainly found this with some people who live in the same city as me. So I wouldn't say FB is useless - I think it's slightly worse than that.
>Sure. And former Google CEO Eric Schmidt famously remarked on the subject of privacy, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
This is constantly posted out of context.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it's important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."
He is talking about not using their services because they are subject to US law, which specifically violates privacy by its very nature.
Schmidt also said:
"You have to fight for your privacy, or you will lose it. Whenever there’s a conflict, the logic of security will trump the right to privacy."
Whenever someone posts this comment in response to the out of context quote, I think to my self that it still really doesn't change my opinion or reading of it.
The dumb part about what Schmidt said is he presumes there is nothing worthwhile about privacy before quickly alluding to a legitimate need for it.
The point about US law is less relevant for me, it's his immediate gut reaction to the legitimacy of privacy.
>Bear in mind that Google was so self-aware of the abuse potential of their position that they adopted "Don't be evil" as a corporate motto - until they dropped it on the grounds that it was underspecified, which strikes me as a quintessential example of corporate amoralism - evil, if you will.
This is why Zuckerberg and Facebook bothers me so much. He is seemingly completely unaware or unwilling to admit the potential for abuse that his technology has created. His messianic complex disallows him from even acknowledging that perhaps there are tradeoffs being made in the name of "connecting the world (that is, making absurd profits)" which are compromising the very stability of our civilization.
Whatever you think of the people, corporations are not people and their behaviour is only partially directed by them. The most reliable predictor of their direction is their bottom line, and the intelligence of the people they hire to improve it.
Bear in mind that Google was so self-aware of the abuse potential of their position that they adopted "Don't be evil" as a corporate motto - until they dropped it on the grounds that it was underspecified, which strikes me as a quintessential example of corporate amoralism - evil, if you will.