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Get a little closer to your screen. That’s it. I want to tell you a secret: Facebook is the best money-making machine on the internet, and it doesn’t come close. *
Facebook may be an indefensible company that normalizes invasive tracking of people for dollars. It is a place where extremists have ricocheted hatred around the world. It could be melting our brains. And it is being prosecuted or pressured by so many governments that I lost count. You can hate it. Can i hate But I almost can’t believe how many of us trust Facebook and how stupidly successful it is.
The company said on Wednesday that its sales – almost all from the ads it sells on Facebook, Instagram and other apps – reached nearly $ 86 billion in 2020 and are growing rapidly, as my colleague Mike Isaac detailed here. Each day, 2.6 billion people use at least one of the Facebook apps, and the number of users is still increasing.
This is a company that is involved in a different scandal every week and that people say they don’t like, but its products are used by billions of people and companies spend like crazy on advertisements during a pandemic to reach them.
And the most incredible thing is that Facebook products cost almost nothing to the company. The Instagram selfie of you getting vaccinated, mom’s post about a fundraiser and her group of parents on Facebook – these are the company’s products, and most of us do them for free. This means that Facebook is very profitable.
I have been writing about corporate finance for a long time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this combination of popularity, fast-growing sales, huge profits – and total disgust. “The gap between Facebook’s public reputation and its financial success has never been greater,” wrote Kurt Wagner of Bloomberg this week.
Historians, tell me if there is a similar company that has been so criticized and, at the same time, so widely used and successful. (If you say that Golden Age trusts like Standard Oil, I would say that they point to Facebook critics who want the company to be disbanded like the trusts of a century ago.)
Near the start of the coronavirus outbreak, my colleagues wrote that strong companies like America’s technology superpowers would likely become even stronger in this crisis. But as corporations’ financial returns for 2020 arrive, it’s clear that we underestimate how much wealthier the wealthier would become.
Apple, Netflix, Microsoft and other technological powers are making products that people and businesses trust to survive a pandemic. And they are making money in hand.
I’m not sure how to feel about it. Yes, I am grateful that companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google and others are helping us to work, go to school, shop and keep us entertained and connected at a time like this. But it is also difficult to ignore the disconnect between their mountains of money and the precarious condition of most large economies in 2020 and the damaged finances of many families.
This is not a new reflection on the gap between the rich and the poor in this pandemic. I just wasn’t sure how to answer an essential question: what is good for Big Tech is good for all of us?
* (OK, fine. Google search is perhaps the best money making machine on the internet. Feel free to discuss it with me!)
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Being informed (-ish) is not good enough
Thursday is data privacy day. (Leave the balloons!) This fake holiday has become an opportunity for Facebook to remind people to review their privacy settings. It is also an opportunity for me to remind you that this is a scam.
These Facebook nudges, as well as Apple’s data privacy labels that my colleague Brian X. Chen wrote on this week and a California privacy law that I recently wrote about reveal a fundamental flaw in how our data is treated in United States.
The mission is to tell us what data companies are collecting about us and give us (some) options to choose from. But I don’t want to be informed as the ultimate goal.
The focus on making data collection transparent (-ish) is why we have long privacy policies that offer the choice between agreeing to anything a company wants to do and not using the service.
That’s why technology executives tout our ability to delete voice recordings from inside our homes – but it doesn’t stop data from being collected in the first place. That’s why the application that Brian uses to open and close the garage door also collects information to direct you to advertisements on the Internet. (YES REALLY.)
Washington Post columnist Geoffrey Fowler wrote that we must reshape data privacy around a simple question: why is so much of our information being collected in the first place?
The answer is because companies can. When all companies, from Facebook to garage door opener manufacturers, are rushing to collect as much data as possible, we can’t really choose to leave, unless you want to isolate yourself from life in the 21st century.
So if Facebook reminds you to take a look at its 40,000 privacy settings, go ahead. But I suggest that you also remember Geoff’s question: Why is so much information being collected?
Before we go …
Hugs to that
AN Furby wrapped in baked beans. No, I can’t explain it. People like to do strange things about Furby. (I found this out in the Garbage Day newsletter.)
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