Facebook privacy - are you worried?

lpullman

Firstly I want to point out that half the IT industry has been telling you this was going to happen or actually happening for a decade and a half now. Maybe now you might start listening to all the other stuff we keep warning you about or telling you not to do. I'm not holding my breath.

Facebook are a sideshow in this. They are just the big name caught with their pants down. They need a good spanking but I actually have some sympathy for Mark Zuckerberg and co in this. Some, but not much as they have certainly taken a cavalier attitude to their users, well, everything when it comes to making a buck from it.

Cambridge Analytica (known in IT land as Cambridge Anal because, well its obvious really) are a bunch of chancers and conmen who are quite incapable of delivering what they claimed. They have conned their customers as much as everyone else. Like all the best cons, their victims can't cry foul without outing themselves as attempting some form of skullduggery. That's not to say they haven't done a whole heap of wrong and deserve all the pain they get.

Alexander Kogan strikes me as one of those guys who's not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. I've come across several over the years, usually in the sheltered workshop of some obscure branch of academia. He had an idea that he tried to turn into a fortune for himself but his version turned out not to be as good as the one FB had already built. He then got shafted by the very guys he thought were going to make him rich. His defense boils down to "sure I did the wrong thing but it didn't work, everyone else was doing it too and the guys we tried to rob are far better at it".

Then there are the right wing nutjob who bankrolled it: Robert Mercer. The closest thing to a real life Bond villain you are ever likely to find. The irony is that pointing at him will get you labelled a conspiracy theorist by the very people who believe in all sorts of conspiracy theories.

/RANT