{"id":1160,"date":"2010-06-07T21:32:36","date_gmt":"2010-06-08T05:32:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/?p=1160"},"modified":"2010-06-07T21:32:36","modified_gmt":"2010-06-08T05:32:36","slug":"manipulating-numbers-that-dont-mean-anything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/manipulating-numbers-that-dont-mean-anything\/","title":{"rendered":"Manipulating numbers that don’t mean anything"},"content":{"rendered":"

Erick Schonfeld wrote a post today saying all the hoopla over Facebook’s privacy isn’t justified<\/a>. I disagree for two reasons.<\/p>\n

1) Awareness.<\/strong>
\nWhen Facebook announced their new changes, I tweeted<\/a> why the hell no one was complaining. Chris Saad and I then wrote one of the first (if not the first) posts that criticised the Facebook move<\/a>. CNN referenced our post<\/a> and the entire industry has now gone over the top complaining.<\/p>\n

Why didn’t anyone from the major blogs critique the announcement immediately? Why the time lag? For the simple fact there wasn’t awareness – people hadn’t thought about it deeply. And to validate my point, check this recent exchange<\/a> with a friend in Iran when I asked him how the people of Iran felt about the changes. He had no idea, and when he found out – he got annoyed.<\/p>\n

2) The monopoly effect<\/strong>
\nI love Facebook as a service. But I will also admit, nothing compares to it – I love it for the sole fact it’s the best at what it does. If there was genuine competition with the company, that offered a compelling alternative – I wouldn’t feel as compelled to use it. They win me over due to great technology and user experience, but I’m not loyal to them because of that.<\/p>\n

I think Facebook has some security right now because no one is in their class. But they will be matched one day, and I think the reaction would be very different. Rather than tolerate it, people would move away. And whilst Facebook can lock my data and think they own me like I’m their slave, the reality is my data is useless with time – what they need is permanent access to me<\/a>, and to have that, they need to ensure my relationships with them is permanently ahead of the curve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Facebook’s growth doesn’t mean people don’t care about privacy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[119,149,197,268,416,357,359],"class_list":["post-1160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-socialcomputing","tag-data","tag-facebook","tag-iran","tag-people","tag-privacy-dataportability","tag-techcrunch","tag-technology","post-preview"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eliasbizannes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}