CIA funded "Fakebook" should be sued of censorship and publicly lying to people about spying!
Facebook ? No thanks, their business is censorship business.
Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger
11–20 of 76 posts
Re: Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger
#12I don't see why this is different than any other acquisition involving combining two userbases. Unless it's about the scale.
Re: Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger
#13> the free content ad network failed to disclose Interesting they don’t call it a ‘social network’. ‘content ad network’ is more accurate in my opinion.
Maybe we should adopt the term? "Content ad network" does have a certain ring to it.
I concur, even before there was widespread corporate advertising my impression of "social networking" was that it was more about advertising your personal activities and beliefs to your network than actually socializing within it.
Re: Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger
#14Is anything Facebook currently doing not shady? I'm not even trying to be snarky, it just seems like every single thing Facebook is doing lately is tainted with misinformation, corruption and spin. Just endless spin and lies.
Is anything currently doing not shady ? That's becoming a really big problem.
Is anything currently doing not shady?
Re: Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger
#15This looks equally bad on the EU, that they lacked the foresight to see that phone numbers in the WhatsApp database could be matched with phone numbers in the Facebook database.
Oh, the EU knew it could happen; they were told it wouldn't happen. We need to operate on some basic level of common trust. If you wanna do business in the EU, you need to play by the rules. As it turns out, not only did it happen, the software/tech to make it happen was already ready ! That makes a pretty strong case against Facebook's intentions. I actually would agree that it was in hindsight stupid because of Fac…
> ... when the Mark Zuckerberg-run company claimed that it wouldn't be able to knit together user IDs, thereby combining the data of the two services.
> ... in which it is alleged that the free content ad network failed to disclose that "the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook users' IDs with WhatsApp users' IDs already existed" at the time of the merger.
Seems like the issue is specifically about them saying they couldn't do it, rather than wouldn't do it.
Though I would assume that a 30 min consultation with any competent technical person would give rise to a dozen different ways in which it COULD be done... device/ad ids, emails, phone numbers or even just correlating geo data over some amount of time would all be trivial ways to relate the two databases together.
Re: Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger
#16This looks equally bad on the EU, that they lacked the foresight to see that phone numbers in the WhatsApp database could be matched with phone numbers in the Facebook database.
Oh, the EU knew it could happen; they were told it wouldn't happen. We need to operate on some basic level of common trust. If you wanna do business in the EU, you need to play by the rules. As it turns out, not only did it happen, the software/tech to make it happen was already ready ! That makes a pretty strong case against Facebook's intentions. I actually would agree that it was in hindsight stupid because of Fac…
My belief in why they wanted to purchase WhatsApp was it presented a threat to fakebook [sic]. This is why they also purchased Instagram, and attempted the same for Snapchat.
If true, then WhatsApp wasn't valued at $19 billion, but rather fakebook [sic] saw that removing the perceived threat was worth the price.
What astounds me the most, is the FTC doesn't seem to investigate tech acquisitions like other industries. Especially, when it seems there is a good indication choice is being removed from the market.
Although, I've seen a few deals structured in a way to make it seem like a smaller company is buying a larger one to avoid a review [at&t SBC, Sears Holdings K-Mart].
Re: Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger
#17I wish the US had laws like the EU that protected the consumer.
Re: Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger
#18I wish the US had laws like the EU that protected the consumer.
If the US had the same taxation and regulatory environment as Europe you wouldn't have Facebook in the first place lol
Re: Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, the EU knew it could happen; they were told it wouldn't happen. We need to operate on some basic level of common trust. If you wanna do business in the EU, you need to play by the rules. As it turns out, not only did it happen, the software/tech to make it happen was already ready ! That makes a pretty strong case against Facebook's intentions. I actually would agree that it was in hindsight stupid because of Fac…
My belief in why they wanted to purchase WhatsApp was it presented a threat to fakebook [sic]. This is why they also purchased Instagram, and attempted the same for Snapchat. If true, then WhatsApp wasn't valued at $19 billion, but rather fakebook [sic] saw that removing the perceived threat was worth the price. What astounds me the most, is the FTC doesn't seem to investigate tech acquisitions like other industries.…
Maybe it's because of the low cost of entry for competitors? If people get upset with what Facebook does to WhatsApp, many other services will spring up and people will migrate to them.
When it comes to thing like Internet service, it's not really the same situation.