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Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#13
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And nothing about the massive downtime fb just experienced yesterday.

Luckily it's not a critical service, nor is Instagram. WhatsApp is probably the most critical as a lot of people depend on it every day, even for business purposes.

WhatsApp is a Facebook product.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#15

> As part of this, I’m sad to share the news that Chris Cox has decided to leave the company. "this" reads as though Cox's departure is a result of the decision to build out a "privacy-focused social platform".

that's what I thought as well, and I can't help but get a major sense of skepticism when Mark mentions "facebook" and "privacy-focused" in the same sentence.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#16
Interesting spin from the NYTimes ("Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox"[0]):

"The departures follow two years of scandals for Facebook around data privacy and disinformation. The issues have buffeted the Silicon Valley company, causing internal turmoil and a redirection in strategy."

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/technology/facebook-chris...

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#18

Interesting spin from the NYTimes ("Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox"[0]): "The departures follow two years of scandals for Facebook around data privacy and disinformation. The issues have buffeted the Silicon Valley company, causing internal turmoil and a redirection in strategy." [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/technology/facebook-chris...

This is what pisses me off. I'm more than willing to criticize Facebook when they deserve it but IMO the media blitzkrieg has said more about the media than Facebook. Not that FB hasn't done scummy things but my faith in the whole attack angle has been reduced

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#19
Chris was one of the rare people who understood both the technical side and business side of a product/business. There were so many times where an engineer would start blabbling big terms to avoid doing something or an PM spouts MBA Bullshit and Chris just shuts it down.

What outsiders who focused on the PR never knew is that there was a balance of power in FB that kept things going forward. Now, with these changes along with Jan Koum leaving last year, I don't know if there is anyone with enough influence to counterbalance the Sheryl-driven short-termism view.

For people without real defined values, "privacy centric" is yet another empty cover to do exactly the opposite.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#20
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Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily it's not a critical service, nor is Instagram. WhatsApp is probably the most critical as a lot of people depend on it every day, even for business purposes.

Why is that, is it incidental or based on the features they offer?

Out of the handful of messaging services with end-to-end encryption, I'm pretty sure Whatsapp is the most popular. So the security would probably be the main driver, and the popularity would be why Whatsapp in particular.
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