Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

Author:Jonathan Taplin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Tags: Computers / Electronic Commerce (See Also Headings Under Business & Economics / E-, Computers / Internet / General, Business & Economics / E-Commerce / General (See Also Computers / Electronic Commerce)
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-04-17T21:00:00+00:00


Bobbi Duncan, a twenty-two-year-old lesbian student at the University of Texas, Austin, tried to keep her sexual orientation secret from her family. But Facebook inadvertently outed her when the president of the Queer Chorus on campus added her to the choir’s Facebook group. Bobbi didn’t know that a friend could add her to a group without her approval and that Facebook would then send a note to her entire list of friends—including her father—announcing that she had joined.

Her father’s note on his Facebook page—“Hell awaits you pervert, good luck singing there”—makes it clear why Bobbi wanted to keep her sexual orientation to herself. Part of the reason she was unable to do so is because Zuckerberg and his Facebook team had embraced the notion of “radical transparency”—the idea that openness is the chief goal of the service and thus you can only use your real name. But many people, including Bobbi Duncan, disagree. Zuckerberg told Kirkpatrick, “To get to this point where there is more openness—that’s a big challenge, but I think we will do it. The concept that the world will be better if you share more is something that is pretty foreign to a lot of people and it runs into all these privacy concerns.”

The disdain for “these privacy concerns” first surfaced when in 2007 Facebook deployed an application called Beacon. This was essentially an alert system that told your friends you had purchased something on a partner site. It was built as an opt-out system, so you actively had to tell Facebook each time you didn’t want the site to broadcast your purchase to all your friends. It was a total disaster from the outset, but Zuckerberg was so confident that he knew better than his users that he refused to turn it off for many weeks while the PR disaster escalated. Eventually he relented and posted a mea culpa on his blog, saying, “We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them.” Despite Zuckerberg’s regret and a payment of $9.5 million in a class-action suit over Beacon, many who worked with him feel he doesn’t really understand privacy. Charlie Cheever, one of his key programmers, told Kirkpatrick, “I feel that Mark doesn’t believe in privacy that much, or at least believes in privacy as a stepping-stone [to radical transparency].”

The privacy issue was reignited in early 2014, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook had conducted a massive social-science experiment on nearly seven hundred thousand of its users.



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