taking joy in the popping of the social media bubble & other web 2.0 silliness
Today Eric Schmidt said what had to be one of the most incredibly stupid things a man who helps guide a company who has built its reputation, and massive wealth, around the idea of ‘do no evil’ could possibly say.
It happened in a CNBC interview with Maria Bartiromo and I think it is a sentence that will come back to haunt not just Schmidt but also Google as a whole. The sentence that will be forever etched in the Long Tail of search engines was this:
In a roomful 800-pound gorillas Facebook is probably the smallest one but that hasn’t slowed down any aspirations it might have to become one of the biggest. As it sets to pass the 300 million plus active users Facebook is setting its sights on some goals for the future especially now that they apparently have gotten over their Twitter fascination.
While part of this plan is obviously to try and surpass companies like Google and Microsoft they also apparently want to get involved with things like user health services and financial information. This is according to a post by Kim-Mai Cutler at VentureBeat quoting Facebook’s vice president of growth, mobile and international expansion – Chamath Palihapitya:
Palihapitya said that he and Zuckerberg have tossed around ideas like offering online health services, and a way to transfer financial information back and forth between users, he said.
This is the part that I am having a big problem with. Yes some will say that we already share financial information over the web so how would it be any different if it is Facebook or a financial institution providing your online service?
First off Facebook is in business for one reason only and that is to make massive amounts of money. There is nothing wrong with that but they do it by making all our activity and data available to advertisers to place ads against. They are not a benevolent company. They are company in the business of providing companies with one of the largest databases of consumer data.
Now this is the same company that wants to be responsible for handling our information when it comes to our health and finances. Sorry but this is not a good idea especially given the fact that Facebook’s handling of user privacy has been questionable at best (Beacon anyone?). In this regard the social media company has been told by Canada, and a growing number of European countries, that their handling of user data and information is problematic at best or even breaks laws at the worst.
The moment millions of dollars are stake consumers always seem to get the short end of the stick and Facebook is no different. To think that Facebook would have access to things like our medical information, no matter how slight, or that they want to be a pipeline for our financial information scares the shit out of me.
This is going to be one of the biggest companies in the world at some point with one of the biggest databases of consumer information that they have no qualms about letting other companies data mine. I have never been a big fan of Facebook and while I have been concerned in the past by the things that the company does this idea really concerns me.
Sorry but this will not end well.
When blogging first started out much of what was written was done anonymously with made up names. Over time we seem to have shifted naturally to using our real names but in some cases that anonymity was something some bloggers felt they needed to keep.
Those days may be falling by the wayside as more and more anonymous bloggers are finding themselves targets of court cases around the world, trying to strip the safety of anonymity from them. Case in point is Orwell Prize winner Nightjack in Britain who was recently unmasked because of a decision of the High Court in that country.
Nightjack for those who aren’t familiar with the story is a British police officer who wrote about his job - the good and the bad. His blog is gone now having been deleted in the wake of the legal decision. In part the decision said that blogging was "essentially a public rather than a private activity" and therefore his name could be made public.
I wonder how many more of these type of pages will start showing up on the web as we lose great and valuable voices.
