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Get a little closer to your screen. That’s it. I want to tell you a secret: Facebook is the best money machine on the internet, and it’s not a call. *
Facebook is perhaps an indefensible company that normalizes intrusive tracking of people for dollars. It is a place where extremists worldwide incite hatred. It can melt our brains. And it is being sued or encouraged by so many governments that I have lost count. You may hate it. I might hate it? But I can hardly believe how many of us trust Facebook and how stupidly successful it is.
The company said on Wednesday that its sales – almost all of which come from the ads it sells on Facebook, Instagram and its other programs – will reach nearly $ 86 billion by 2020 and grow rapidly, as my colleague Mike Isaac explained here. Every day, 2.6 billion people use at least one of Facebook’s apps, and the number of users continues to rise.
It’s a business that is embroiled in a different scandal every week and that people say they do not like, yet the products are used by billions of people, and businesses spend like crazy on advertising during a pandemic around it. to reach.
And the real wild thing is that Facebook’s products cost the company almost nothing to make. The Instagram selfie of you being vaccinated, Mom’s message about a fundraiser and your Facebook parent group – these are the products of the company, and most of us make them for free. This means that Facebook is very profitable.
I have been writing about corporate finance for a long time. I think I have never seen this combination of popularity, fast growing sales, fat profits and overall disgust. “The gap between Facebook’s public reputation and its financial success has never been greater,” Bloomberg’s Kurt Wagner wrote this week.
Historians, tell me if there is a comparable company that is so insulting and yet so widely used and successful. (If you say the Gilded Age trusts like Standard Oil, I would argue that this is the point for Facebook critics who want the company to be broken up like the trusts of a century ago.)
By the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, my colleagues had written that strong companies like America’s technological superpowers would probably become even stronger in this crisis. But as the financial returns start for companies in 2020, it is clear that we have underestimated how rich the rich would become.
Apple, Netflix, Microsoft and other tech powers are making products that people and businesses rely on to make it through a pandemic. And they rake money in hand.
I’m not sure how I should feel about this. Yes, I am thankful that companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google and others help us work, go to school, go shopping and stay entertained and connected at a time like this. But it is also difficult to ignore the disconnect between their mountains of money and the shaky state of most major economies by 2020 and the battered finances of many families.
This is not a new reflection of the gap between the haves and those who are not in this pandemic. I just remain unsure again about how to answer an essential question: Is what’s good for Big Tech good for all of us?
* (OK, good. Google search is perhaps the best money machine on the internet. Feel free to argue with me!)
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Being informed is not good enough
Thursday is the day for data privacy. (Show the balloons!) This fake holiday has become an opportunity for Facebook to remind people to check their privacy settings. It is also an opportunity to remind you that this is a charade.
These Facebook hugs, as well as the Apple privacy labels my colleague Brian X. Chen wrote about this week, and a California privacy law I recently wrote about, show a fundamental flaw in the handling of our data. in the United States.
The mission is to inform us about the data that companies collect about us and to give us some choice. But I do not want to be the final goal.
The focus on making data collection transparent (-ish) is why we have long privacy policies that offer the choice to agree to anything a business wants to do and not use the service.
This is why technology managers cite our ability to remove voice recordings from our homes, but that does not stop the data from being collected. This is why the app that Brian uses to open and close his garage door also collects information to target him with internet ads. (YES, REALLY.)
Washington Post columnist Geoffrey Fowler wrote that we need to reformulate the privacy of data around a simple question: why is so much of our information collected in the first place?
The answer is because companies can do it. When every business, from Facebook to a manufacturer of garage door openers, competes to collect as much data as possible, we can not really choose unless you want to cut off the life of the 21st century.
So if Facebook reminds you to look at its 40,000 privacy settings, go for it. But I suggest you also remember Geoff’s question: why is so much information being collected?
Before we go …
Hugs on this
A Furby wrapped with baked beans. No, I can not explain it. People like weird Furby stuff. (I spotted it in the Garbage Day newsletter.)
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