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Facebook Businesses Privacy The Almighty Buck

Top Communications Union Joins Group Pushing for Facebook's Breakup (bloomberg.com) 121

Posted by msmash from the tussle-continues dept.
The top U.S. communications union is joining a coalition calling for the Federal Trade Commission to break up Facebook, as the social media company faces growing government scrutiny and public pressure. From a report: "We should all be deeply concerned by Facebook's power over our lives and democracy," said Brian Thorn, a researcher for the 700,000-member Communications Workers of America, the newest member of the Freedom From Facebook coalition. For the FTC not to end Facebook's monopoly and impose stronger rules on privacy "would be unfair to the American people, our privacy, and our democracy," Thorn said in an email.

Facebook disclosed July 2 that it's cooperating with probes by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation on how political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica obtained personal information from as many as 87 million of the siteâ(TM)s users without their consent. The FTC, the Department of Justice and some state regulators were already probing the matter, which prompted Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress in April. Facebook also faces calls for regulation from many lawmakers and the public over the privacy issue, Russian efforts to manipulate the 2016 presidential election and the spread of false information on the platform.
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Top Communications Union Joins Group Pushing for Facebook's Breakup More

Top Communications Union Joins Group Pushing for Facebook's Breakup

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  • I don't see the problem with Facebook. (Score:5, Funny)

    by forkfail ( 228161 ) on Monday July 09, 2018 @03:05PM (#56918896)

    If you don't like it, you can always go to MySpace or GeoCities.

  • What is this nonsense? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    You can walk away from Facebook at any time. Just turn off the computer, stand up, and walk away.

  • I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)

    by brucekeller ( 5312389 ) on Monday July 09, 2018 @03:12PM (#56918946)
    What are you supposed to break up and how will it help anything? Instagram and FB as two entities will probably just be even more effective at invading privacy. Working for a company that was a former Bell company... it really doesn't matter. We have a big huge weird metal desk in our courtyard that's AT&T's and a number of executives were from oldschool AT&T. Breaking a company up really just ends up making the executives more money and makes it harder to account for shenanigans.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward


      Working for a company that was a former Bell company... it really doesn't matter.
      You obviously weren't alive during the reign of Bell. Before the breakup, you couldn't connect 3rd party phones to the All Mighty Bell Network. Long distance rates were sky freaking high, and there was NO competition. Since the breakup we actually got competition in the LD market. You likely weren't alive during that time when everyone and their dog wanted you to switch to THEIR long distance network. My father used to pla

      • If it hadn't been for the Bell breakup we'd probably all be paying 4.99 per hour for AOL high speed 28Kbps.

        • Interesting question, however. Would the "cost plus" model have meant research dollars would have gone into other things? Like, genuine research? An awful lot of what we call R&D today is merely application of things that AT&T and IBM came up with..in the 60s.

        • I thought AT&T didn't allow modems on their network for things like that during their rein?

      • How would you break up Facebook like a Bell? There aren't geographic regions with separate infrastructure here. One of the points is to be able to have connections from all over the world. I'm not saying it can't be done - it could work as a distributed database with data standards and required sharing between the resultant companies. But it will be less efficient if friends are on separate systems and much work would need to be done to mitigate the impact. It isn't a wave the magic wand and it is done thin

        • They own multiple communications networks, including WhatsApp and Instagram.

          • I just don't see what good breaking those away would do. They are separate types of products. I don't think that either WhatsApp or Instagram is a monopoly. The Facebook app is close. Breaking the Facebook platform up would be nice, but if done, it should be done in a fashion that doesn't take away the united platform. When we broke up AT&T, everyone could still call each other.

  • Break up (Score:3)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Monday July 09, 2018 @03:15PM (#56918974)

    Into two social networks. One for the cool people and one for the dorks.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's all for dorks. Get a life offline and you won't miss it, zombies.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gnick ( 1211984 )

      One for the cool people and one for the dorks.

      And two Denny's, so we can always say, "Let's not go to that one. Let's go to the good one."

    • One for the people cool enough to be worth tracking their every movement and utterance, and one for the people that might interact with those people, so they can keep in practice?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You could break it up into 6 companies
      -Advertising
      -Facebook
      -Messenger
      -WhatsApp
      -Instagram
      -Datacenters

  • I'm having a hard time understanding how Facebook is a monopoly. Sure, Facebook has a lot of features that other services have, and it's difficult to bring users into competing services, but I fail to see how that constitutes a monopoly. Facebook isn't the only game in town, they're just the "best" one. That's like saying the NFL has a monopoly on American style football; there's the Canadian League, Arena Football League, UFL, and so on - it's just that the NFL is the only one that doesn't suck. Why not br
    • Try finding your "friends" on another social networking service.

      • My "friends" can only be found on other networking service. Most people wouldn't consider it "social" though. ;)

      • You mean like LinkedIn or Twitter or ...?

        Facebook should be slammed for what it has done, and it should REALLY be slammed for its ridiculously, deliberately misleading advertising going on now. But calling it a monopoly and "breaking it up", that's nonsense. Don't punish success, punish the bad things that anyone does.

        If you haven't seen the current ad campaign, here it is in a nutshell. People talking about how great it was to be able to connect to friends, "and then we got spam" and invasion of privacy

        • Spam and invasion of privacy was around long before Facebook. Facebook just perfected them.

          • Spam and invasion of privacy was around long before Facebook.

            Not on Facebook. The ad is talking about how great Facebook was.

        • Facebook has over 2 billion users. Twitter has 328 million and LinkedIn doesn't even show up on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Perhaps we could find some of our friends among Youtube's 1.5 billion users?

          Nope. Facebook has an effective monopoly.

          • Facebook has over 2 billion users. Twitter has 328 million and LinkedIn doesn't even show up on this list

            The statement was "find your friends", not "find 2 billion people you don't know". You and your friends are free to move to Twitter or LinkedIn or any of the other social media sites. I assume you know who your friends are and you can suggest that they join you there, or they can suggest you join them there, without having to wade through 2 billion names and profile pictures.

            Yes, Facebook is successful. They are not the only game in town. That's why they aren't a monopoly.

            • OK, more directly: If you have ~600 family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, what is the likelihood (statistical probability) of finding them all or most of them on each of the social networking services? At a rough, heuristic guess, which one would have the highest probability?

      • That's not Facebook's fault, that's the fault of the other social networking services (and of your friends for staying on Facebook). Google tried like hell with their "Google Plus" service, but I found it to be spammy and not interactive in the same way Facebook is (I, by the way, have my settings so that facebook never sends me emails). Facebook's user interface and features make it to be the clear winner to me in Social Media applications. Why would I use another service? Busting them up doesn't make othe
        • I'm not blaming Facebook for being successful, I'm blaming them for being incompetent idiots who shouldn't be responsible for more than 2 billion people's personal information.

  • How would that work? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kerashi ( 917149 ) on Monday July 09, 2018 @03:28PM (#56919066)

    The biggest area of concern that would need to be broken up is the Facebook social network, and I fail to see any meaningful way of breaking that part up. Sure, you could make Facebook spin off some of its other brands, but Facebook itself would still likely be intact and a problem.

    However, I'm not sure that Facebook even is such a great problem. Stupid people who believe everything they read on the internet are a much bigger problem. Facebook just provides a platform for sharing such junk, and I'd say any platform that allows stupid people will suffer from similar problems. Speaking of which, I just got a Facebook notification from a stupid friend that cars will explode if the fuel tanks are filled completely in the summer heat. I need smarter friends.

    • You might break it up into the social media part and then data analysis/advertising part.

      Regulate via sound privacy law (one can dream) so the advertising spin off does not have total and complete access to the social media data and the social media part can sell this data to anyone within the regulatory framework.

      The sound privacy law is the most important part followed by encouraging competition with what do to with the shareable data and where we want to go as a society with targeted ads.

  • Like bulls charging a cape (Score:3)

    by jbmartin6 ( 1232050 ) on Monday July 09, 2018 @03:34PM (#56919116)
    Facebook, sure, OK. But so typical of humanity. We will charge at the red cape, and think we have achieved something. The real threat to us is companies like this [wired.com] which no one ever heard about and thus will never get called to testify to Congress.
    • It's funny how little media attention it got as well. A company mass collecting data on a massive scale, probably with Facebook involved, and more than likely has a complete profile on you, leaked massive data, nothing happens. Well, nothing happened to them, meanwhile a lot of identity theft going on thanks to them.
      • Also note how few upvotes the post got despite being extraordinarily relevant, interesting, and informative. :)

  • This is a non-starter (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Harvey Manfrenjenson ( 1610637 ) on Monday July 09, 2018 @03:45PM (#56919182)

    Facebook is useful and popular precisely because everyone in the world with any interest in social media is on it (well, except for places that restrict free access to the Internet, like China). You can't "break it up" into 20 different social-media sites, because then it won't be useful any more.

    Sure, you could force them to spin off Instagram or whatever as a separate corporate entity, but as brucekeller observes-- what difference would that make? You'd still be left with a core platform that has billions of users. That makes the core platform bigger than any news outlet in the history of the world, and means that it will always have enormous power to influence political opinion.

    With that said: I'd love to migrate from Facebook to a different social media site, one which still retains the basic functionality of Facebook. I'd be OK with doing this even knowing that most of my friends would *not* be on the new site, at least initially. But I tried looking for Facebook alternatives a few months ago, and the results were... not encouraging. Maybe someone here can post a suggestion.

    • Re:This is a non-starter (Score:4, Interesting)

      by pots ( 5047349 ) on Monday July 09, 2018 @05:05PM (#56919656)
      There's more than one way to break up a company. If Facebook's back-end was separated from the front-end stuff, and the back-end company was either turned into a non-profit trade association or had an open access mandate, then we could have competing front-end companies - all of which would have the same user base.

      Of course, this by itself would do nothing to address the privacy problems. At a minimum, personal information controlled by the back-end company would need to well regulated. Really the front end companies should get the same, but it's not quite as important.

    • I've been working on an alternative for a little bit if anyone is interested. The central philosophy is basically that of the FSF: give users freedom and allow them to control the software they run.

  • Why just Facebook ? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nehumanuscrede ( 624750 ) on Monday July 09, 2018 @03:46PM (#56919190)

    Instead of focusing on a single company, why not target the crux of the problem instead ?

    Get some serious privacy laws enacted so that NO company is allowed to obtain or collect private information from individuals without their express knowledge and consent. ( No, burying it on page 212 of a EULA doesn't qualify, nor does tying the right to spy on us for a discounted price for a service ) Obtaining it without consent is basically theft and should be treated as such.

    Companies get a fucking slap on the wrist for surreptitiously obtaining data on us and / or losing it in a breach. Why is it I can get hit with a $150K fine for downloading a music track ( per infringement ) but companies stealing OUR personal data is perfectly legal ? Imagine if companies had to pay a $150K fine for every customers data they obtained without consent. ( Or on a per customer / account basis during a data breach ) That would be one impressive fine if you have several million customers data in your possession. . .

    Additionally, some harsh laws ( at least on par with HIPAA laws ) need to be enacted to protect said information and force companies to take this matter seriously.

    The only way you fix this is if you hurt them financially.

  • Breaking up and regulating Facebook would be a good start. But they're only in this mess because they're incompetent. The corporations that hold the most personal and intrusive data on us are the telcos. They also know exactly who we are, i.e. no anonymous or fake accounts when they have our home address and bank information. I wonder who they sell that data to? How could we find out?

  • Cut off one head (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Two more shall take its place!

    Hail Zuckra!

  • Burn the whole thing to the ground. Go 'connect' with people the old fashioned way: in person.

  • Break up a company that provides a free service? How does that work? More like the feds aren't getting their cut and business could get "difficult" in the future.

  • OK, in my ideal consumer-first world, we'd both:

    1) Break up monopolies or any company large enough to get more than a third of a market
    2) Outlaw unions that could disrupt public transportation/services (like this AT&T union), artificially drive prices (or the price of government services) up, influence elections, or drive companies out of the city/state/country

    As a side benefit, this might also have the effect of removing a lot of money from politics (e.g., https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?cycle=2016)

  • Consumers are benefited by centralization of a sort. In order to have that without having a monopoly, standards must be forced. What good would phone system competition have been without a telephony standard?

    We should create a distributed data standard for social networking and force all providers to start using it, open up their data to all other providers, and not be able to mandate any client. Build privacy control into the standard and force compliance. Users should be able to say that the providers hav

  • I'm all for it, but why just Facebook? (Score:3)

    by Chameleon Man ( 1304729 ) on Monday July 09, 2018 @05:26PM (#56919794)
    Is Facebook getting targetted because they don't pay off politicians? I would support breaking up Facebook, but there are a hell of a lot more important companies that need to be broken up. Comcast, anyone?

  • Heh. There's no way an FTC with a chair nominated by a Republican president would think about splitting up Facebook (or most any corporation, for that matter).

    It could be beneficial if some of Facebook's vertical integration could be split apart (e.g. messenger, Instagram), which might provide room for competing services to fill those tasks. But there's just zero chance the current FTC will be interested in bothering.

  • wants them broken up is because they want to unionize them.
  • I don't get the concern over this. What are you a member of some primitive tribe that thinks your soul will be stolen if your image is take and then posted somewhere online? It's a photograph. If you appear in the background of a photograph I take it's not like it matters or anyone cares. People spend too much time worrying about this shit. Just go live your life and quit worrying about who posted a picture you happen to appear in on facebook and what nefarious bullshit some imaginary supervillain is plann
  • ... Let's break up all of the media conglomerates. Times corporation? Your times has come! AT&T? Let's try A, and T, and T. Comcast? I'm out of jokes, but you're on the list, along with Time Warner, Sinclair, I Heart Media, and so on and so forth.

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