Is Facebook evil or merely incompetent?

I'd say Facebook is opportunistic more than anything. They know how badly people can't sit still or be alone and they simply profit off that. Like Tocqueville said 'people get the government they deserve.' This is what happens when people don't think about how closely freedom, privacy, and selfhood are linked. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

At Facebook the motto is said to be "move fast and break things". I think that explains pretty much everything about them, the good and the bad.

Any sufficiently entrenched incompetence is indistinguishable from evil.<p><i>[Paraphrasing Arthur C. Clarke]</i>

I'm having a hard time buying that they're incompetent. I mean, we just had all those stories about one of their biggest partners leaking data to advertisers, then they go on to ban the practice and remove <i>other</i> (far less profitable) programs made by different companies from their systems and pretend that we won't notice....<p>Now, it could be that they hired away the 10% of Google that's the least competent, but I don't really buy that. And somebody ought to have noticed all the news stories about selling Facebook data to advertisers.<p>So if they're "incompetent" it's because they're sticking their heads in the sand.

"The present king of France is bald."

Neither. Facebook has consistently pushed the privacy (or lack thereof) envelope since they launched the newsfeed, and they have consistently profited from it. The regular press backlash hasn't done shit to their bottom line, so until the misstep that actually causes the general public to care (which could come shockingly fast), they are simply a brilliant company.

While I don't disagree with the author's points of discussion I do disagree with the tone and attempt at humor. Sometimes even if you do have something valid to say your words won't be sweeter by sitting on a bee hive.