Facebook inflection point: Now everyone knows this greedy mass surveillance operation for what it is
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With its low costs and enormous and very real revenue, Facebook clearly isn't heading for an Enron crash. It may be less transparent than big brands want, and have to restate its metrics now and again, but it emphatically isn't operating any kind of fraud.
Facebook banked $16bn in profit on $40bn of revenue last year, and it is continuing to hoover up ad dollars (almost all new advertising spending is split with the other duopolist, Google). User inertia and the network effect (you go where the people are) will ensure no short-term crash.
However, there is a spooky echo of how a company that one minute seems to be vast and omniscient suddenly isn't, and very rapidly becomes the embodiment of cynicism and amorality. It's a cosmic comeuppance, as The Onion nailed it: American People Admit Having Facebook Data Stolen Kind Of Worth It To Watch That Little Fucker Squirm.
As Jonathan Taplin of the University of Southern California remarked in the Los Angeles Times: "If we wanted to mark an inflection point, it was this week. This is an 'aha' moment for a lot of people, most importantly, for a lot of regulators and legislators."
Mark Zuckerberg prevaricated for days before addressing the Cambridge Analytica story and his non-apology hasn't helped. Zuckerberg's reaction has been criticised, but that's because his most effective response would be to do a double Ratner*: don't worry, our ads aren't as effective as we told you. And secondly, we'll stop letting everyone access the social graph willy-nilly, which was its whole point.
And it isn't just Facebook that's in trouble: so is the other half of the ad duopoly, Google, which knows just as much about you, including whole swathes of your life that Facebook can only guess at.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/23/facebook_and_the_future/
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