MEMORANDUM
TO: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, and Sheryl Sandberg, COO
FROM: a Facebook user pulling the plug
SUBJECT: the reasons I don't believe what you are saying, and goodbye
Dear Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg - may I call you Zuck and Sand? - I have been a Facebook user for many years, which you already know because your memo-reading algorithm has already listed all my personals for you. I have not opened Facebook for a couple of months, and for my 74th birthday (you already know it was 2 days ago) I am pulling the plug.
The reason is very simple - I don't trust you. Now, Zuck and Sand, you might be, probably are, very nice kids (at my age I can call you that); however, you have done a great and possibly tragic mis-service to humanity, as have the other major internet companies, by helping develop surveillance capitalism. You are keenly aware of the effects of your so-called "social network" tools. Many of your former colleagues, people who made millions/billions of dollars in the early years of Facebook, Google, WhatsApp and all the others, are now bemoaning where it all has gone, and what it is doing to society, including effects on children's brains.
I have heard both of you interviewed about this most recent Cambridge Analytica scandal and, to be blunt, I'm not buying what you are peddling. Your apologies are meaningless, and you know it. You both spoke from the same script, which included things like what Zuck said in one segment: “We didn’t focus enough on preventing abuse and thinking through how people could use these tools to do harm as well,...That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, hate speech, in addition to developers and data privacy. We didn’t take a broad enough view of what our responsibility is, and that was a huge mistake. It was my mistake.” Sand said mostly the same thing in an interview I heard on NPR. What is it those teenagers from the Parkland, FL high school say? "We say B.S.!"
For 2017, Facebook had $41 billion revenue and $16 billion profit. You have thousands of employees, all very smart people. You know exactly what your business model is; Facebook sells its user’s data as commodities to anyone who wants to buy them. Are you seriously telling us that you could not "focus enough on preventing abuse" and did not "take a broad enough view" of your responsibility to your users? Seriously? If your mega-company is so stupid, why would anyone trust you with their personal information? Of course you have known all along that you were not protecting your users, and of course you've known all along that your view is not broad enough, it is focused on one thing - maximizing profit.
I truly hope the Facebook and similar fads fade away and that the internet changes into a useful and usable tool that is not based on monetizing users. Companies can still make money in various ways, such as charging money for using the service (see my previous post). Most people already do this - Comcast, Spotify, Netflix, Apple Cloud and Apple Music, and on and on. We all pay for services we want to use because we know a simple rule: there is no such thing as a free lunch.
So goodbye Zuck and Sand, I am no longer harvestable data (well. actually I know that I don't need to be a Facebook user for you to collect my data, but let's pretend it's true for this post). I hope you make drastic changes to your business model, and I hope you come under some new form of realistic regulation soon, and I hope your monopoly is broken up.
And do let me know if your business model changes; I might re-join then.
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