He started X.com. The founders of PayPal were forced by their VCs to merge the two companies, because X.com had a massive cash position, and a banking license.
This isn't just basic cookie tracking. They have an actual profile on you, without your consent, with the people who have you in their address book and even potentially your purchasing habits, from the data they purchase from data brokers like Datalogix. They maintain this profile on you separately from other users, and they make immediate use of it if you create an account.
Not sure why this has been posted here. The app is nearly abandoned and dead at this point.
I know we all want alternatives to the status quo, but you're not going to find it among a bunch of copycat services that haven't solved any of the fundamental problems causing us so much trouble today.
So much of VC funding is just about being in the right place at the right time. A lot of these guys seem like geniuses because of winning bets, but that's because nobody talks about their flops.
It's entertaining watching all of the VCs who have made a major bet on crypto, who are now doubling down on what looks more like an overheated casino losing steam. Fred Wilson might end up watching the tide go out on this one. Maybe people will finally remember that he was part of Twitter's clueless board, the one that didn't think it was important to buy Instagram?
Experian et al do not have a two-way channel they can use to run psychological experiments based on your usage data and communications with others. Facebook can, and does.
These hearings are just the tip of the iceberg. You're like the guy saying Bitcoin has hit its peak at $100.
Actually, irrelevant. There would be more articles that are critical of China if newspaper publishers weren't paranoid about losing a shot at a payday buyout from a Chinese media firm.
All communities have leaders, whales, whatever you want to call them. Even Bitcoin is now controlled by a small group of mostly Chinese people. Decentralization does nothing other than put control in the hands of an unpredictable and potentially unaccountable group of people, whereas centralized systems have people you can point to and hold accountable (or so we hope). There is a reason it's never worked throughout history, and why decentralized systems always collapse into a more efficient centralized form.
This actually seems more damaging and disgusting than all of the Cambridge Analytica news. Facebook employees actively working to help scammers get billions of dollars out of uneducated poor users. Despicable.
Albee started lobbying for the company on Oct. 30 -- two days before his former boss, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, grilled Colin Stretch, the company’s general counsel, in a hearing.