Facebook Redux: Users, Customers and Consumers Redefined
Facebook is still on the Apology Tour. COO Sheryl Sandberg finally leaned in to the controversy, insisting to the media that ‘We Do Not Sell Your Data’. According to Mark Zuckerberg back in 2009, users own all of their data.
Says Vanity Fair, Zuckerberg Hits Users with the Hard Truth: You Agreed to This.
He Can Do Alot Better
Zuckerberg et al became wealthy and powerful off Facebook users. We are the ones Facebook needs to keep happy and coming back, which, like it or not, makes us the consumers, aka, the customers.
Silicon Valley, you want to change the world? Time to start changing some definitions, too.
As an aside, some words of advice for Mr. Zuckerberg and any entrepreneur who craves the national or global stage, or finds him/herself inexorably thrust on to it out of sheer hubris or misstep: the less said the better. Someone’s always listening. Someone’s always recording. Someone always remembers and dredges it out in a search, so do and say what you must or will, but our suggestion: If you do behave arrogantly and attempt a cover up/apology with false contrition, as a public figure, you have one of only two choices:
- Keep your head down, and if you don’t have the personality for that,
- Duck.
With his various manipulations and endless and meaningless apologies, and politics aside, the Cambridge Analytica story exposed Facebook for what it truly is: the greatest data collection and global surveillance network ever implemented (with the possible exception of Google) built on an underlying and completely unregulated surveillance economy. Mark Zuckerberg is now not only the Facebook founder, CEO and majority stockholder. He is also the target and make no mistake about it – the regulators very much have him in their sights.