Should-Read: Financing a free-to-users social network by selling users' private information to companies who want to sell you things that you will be happy you bought is a sustainable business model. But Facebook apparently never got the memo. It never realized that financing a free-to-users social network by selling users' private information to companies who want to sell you things that you be unhappy you bought is not sustainable. Nor is financing a free-to-users social network by selling users' private information to companies and others who wish you ill. Facebook was unable to distinguish between those three categories to whom it sold your eyeballs. And so I suspect that, in the long run, it is going down: Hannah Kuchler: The anti-social network: Facebook bids to rebuild trust after toughest week: "Mark Zuckerberg began 2018 vowing to 'fix Facebook'.... That job is more urgent than ever...
...The proliferation of fake news and targeted political adverts on the platform. He initially dismissed the idea that content on the site influenced the election as a “pretty crazy idea” before backtracking. He now faces a more fundamental challenge: to restore trust.... Cambridge Analytica... obtained Facebook data harvested from 50m people and allegedly used to target voters in the US have triggered questions about the protection of privacy... regulation that could potentially hamper the group’s business model.... He admitted that the company had made mistakes.... The opening exploited by Cambridge Analytica can be linked directly to the choices Mr Zuckerberg made... his lack of attention to privacy, his rush to open up to developers, his pursuit of a business model based on targeted advertising. He, and others at Facebook, ignored warnings from employees and activists that they were going down the wrong path...
