Bulletproof
The saddening, maddening, thing is that none of this matters. The number of active Facebook users and the share price will carry on climbing. This is probably a bug but if it turns out to be a deliberate choice for Facebook to watch and listen to everything happening around a user's phone, even to people nearby who do not use Facebook then it will be business as usual. Only doomsday preppers or the odd one in the unlit corner of the IT department will notice or care. 2.45 billion monthly active users as of September 2019. An 8 percent increase year-on-year. We can quibble over the word 'free' but they offer a quite amazing free service to people who don't realise all those services are available elsewhere with minimal effort. Minimal effort being an insurmountable hurdle for most people. Why bother, it's right there? Since the WWW came along I've seen a few companies attempt to capture it and brand it as their own. Anyone remember the AOL browser that gave you everything you'd ever need, sanitised and monetised? It was fun watching MSN fail to be The Internet. For billions of people Facebook is The Internet. They provide the messaging, the news, the games, the recipes, the porn. Wikipedia comes to them through Facebook. I've seen recently a few people say that what happened to Myspace can happen to Facebook but I've lost faith in that. I think it's here to stay and here to be The Internet for most Internet users. I suspect our only hope is legislators forgetting who their biggest donor is and who offers them exec-director positions after their political careers and them writing some legislation to make Facebook do the right thing. I for one will be holding my breath until that happens. n.b. charitable donations instead of flowers for the funeral.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
