November 20, 2018

The Zuckerberg File


Over the years this blog has written a lot of nasty things about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. As the world is coming to realize what a toxic pile of crap Facebook is, I thought we'd collect some of our favorites in one place.

Here you go:

On responsibility...
"It's very simple. Facebook is way too powerful to be run by a jerk like Mark Zuckerberg. He has... shown himself to be utterly inadequate to handle the responsibilities of managing an organization with the power and influence of Facebook. Or even understanding what the responsibilities are."
On leadership...
"The absence of probity and maturity that Facebook has displayed has been baked into the company's DNA by Zuckerberg's arrogance, and will remain there as long as his vapid philosophies define their culture...
   "Young people are just smarter"

   "Move fast and break things"

This is the credo of an infantile egotist. You can draw a straight line from this nonsense to the current headlines."
About Zuckerberg's testimony in Washington...
"Zuckerberg will be strung up for ignoring the privacy rights of hundreds of millions of people by clowns who have been ignoring the privacy rights of hundreds of millions of people. There's no one to root for in this cage match."
On lying...
"It becomes harder and harder to overstate the corruption and treachery of the online ad industry. Lord knows I've tried...Facebook has become famous for its lunatic metrics and bizarre rationalizations...This week it was reported that Facebook was claiming to reach 41 million Americans between the ages of 18-24...There are only 31 million of them."
On duplicity...
One good thing about Facebook - their duplicity is so transparent that anyone who claims he "didn't know" has to be an idiot....After Zuckerberg promised our bewildered representatives in Washington two weeks ago that Facebook would abide by the "spirit" of the GDPR privacy regulations... this week Facebook moved 1.5 billion accounts out of Europe to the US to avoid the consequences of those regulations.
On surveillance...
  • FB maintains the right to collect your phone number and other information about you when anyone, including people you don't know, upload their contacts that may include you.
  • Even when you turn off location services, FB tracks your location through Wi-Fi access points, cell towers and IP addresses.
  • You probably think FB is collecting data about you from the device you're using. Silly you. If you are anywhere near any other devices on your network they are collecting info from those devices as well. It's magic!
  • FB tracks you through third parties whether or not you are logged into Facebook.
  • And the pièce de résistance -- Facebook's new data policy asserts that they track you even if you don't have a Facebook account.
On transparency...
FB's terms of service and privacy policies are longer than the US Constitution...this week they increased the language of their data policy by 55%, you know, just to make things more convenient for us. 
Technology vs Wisdom...
"...today in the marketing industry we have foolishly equated technology with wisdom. The result is Mark Zuckerberg."