This just isn’t true. Plenty of people at FB read HN, everyone is acutely aware of the company’s reputation, and there is robust internal discussion and debate about all of these topics (and more)
Please don’t imply that I’m speaking in bad faith and actually just motivated by money. Consider the possibility that I truly believe what I’m saying — anything less is just a horrible way to debate.
I am quite capable of making similar sums outside of Facebook. In fact I plan to leave soon for reasons that have nothing to do with ethics, and I don’t foresee myself changing my opinion once I’m no longer an employee.
Now to answer your specific points:
* Facebook did not steal credentials. They were willingly given.
* “Nobody actually wants to give this data away” how do you know? Do you have polling data on this? My personal belief is that most people don’t care at all.
Also you’re completely ignoring my assertion that it probably was just an accident. Hard to argue that something was “taken by force” by accident.
* Can you give me some examples of Zuckerberg knowingly lying about objective, verifiable facts to Congress?
* Well, your guess is as good as mine whether it’s better or worse on balance. My intuition is that it’s better. You haven’t really argued against this, just given some examples of the worst possible downsides and asking if they’re worth the most trivial upsides (conveniently ignoring the real value of communication tools in people’s lives, which has nothing to do with dog pictures and memes).
In my experience, FB isn’t divisive at all. I use it to talk daily to people who have become very close friends and who live in a different city (my home town). Without that connection, I would be extremely lonely.
* I’ve heard plenty of people in the US tell me great, unjust untruths like they were facts. They saw them on TV or heard them on the radio.
* As for FB being the most destructive force, I think you’d have to give that title to climate change, resource depletion, terrorism, and war.
Please don’t downvote me into being the same color as the page background. I’m giving a serious answer to a question that was posed.
This has been asked before on HN. The genuine answer is some combination of:
* criticisms of FB are wildly exaggerated. This takes many forms, but in this particular case I think it’s the issue of attributing to malice what’s best explained by incompetence. Somebody probably just reused some old email importing code without understanding it thoroughly. If you know anything about how FB works, that’s infinitely more plausible than some shady conspiracy to unethically harvest the contacts of a small percentage of users for a slight improvement in ranking or targeting.
Facebook is not some well-oiled machine, it is a jumbled mess of thousands of junior engineers, perpetually barely avoiding collapsing under its own weight.
* People inside FB generally believe, whatever they think of Zuck, that he doesn’t just outright lie about verifiable facts. The entire code repository is completely open to all employees. If adding this feature really was malicious and FB’s response is an outright lie, somebody WILL find the commit and leak it.
* Even if FB is doing harm, on balance the good it’s doing is greater. It has made communication between humans easier and lower-friction which has many upsides.
Part of this is that all the upsides are concrete and obvious (people fall in love on Facebook/IG/MN/WA, they stay in touch with friends and family, they run a business, etc). Whereas the downsides are abstract and hypothetical (maybe someday someone will use Facebook’s collected data for some nefarious purpose).
* Even if all of the above is false and FB really is harmful to the world, the situation certainly won’t be improved by thinking people quitting, and leaving the company totally in the hands of yes-men who drink all the kool-aid.