In 2016, the “Pope of Silicon Valley” — Marc Andreessen — backed off social media after tweeting “anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?”
The billionaire venture capitalist and Facebook board member was angry because Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government rejected Facebook’s plan to offer free internet — a free internet that Facebook would have control over.
In light of Facebook’s ethical fumbles — new revelations keep surfacing about how Facebook exposed millions of users’ data for four years — India is looking smarter than the other parts of the world that gave Facebook free access to data.
After being “burned to a crisp” for manhandling Facebook users’ data, “Cambridge Analytica’s ashes blew away on 2 May,” Naked Security reported.
Andreessen criticized India’s opposition to Free Basics on Facebook, likening India’s opposition to free Internet to anti-colonialism. His comment caused such an uproar that he apologized and deleted it.
Critics argued that Facebook’s Free Basics violates tenets of net neutrality, which stipulate that all internet content and users should be treated equally, CNN Money reported. They said it was dangerous to allow Facebook to decide what content was allowed on Free Basics, and what was not.
Andreessen disagreed. “Denying world’s poorest free partial Internet connectivity when today they have none, for ideological reasons, strikes me as morally wrong,” — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 10, 2016.
Cambridge Analytica wasn’t an aberration. A twin named Cubeyou turned up in April: yet another firm that dressed up its personal-data snarfing as “nonprofit academic research,” in the form of personality quizzes, and handed over the data to marketers.”
In a private message leaked in 2010, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg wrote, “Yea so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard . . . just ask.” His friend asked how he did it, Fast Company reported. “People just submitted it,” he said. “I don’t know why.”
“They ‘trust me,’” he added. “Dumb fucks.”
Those were the early days of moving fast and breaking things, and nearly 15 years later, Zuckerberg certainly regrets saying that. But even then he had caught on to a lucrative flaw in our relationship with data at the beginning of the 21st century, a delusional trust in distant companies based on agreements people don’t read, which have been virtually impossible to enforce. It’s a flaw that has since been abused by all kinds of hackers, for purposes the public is still largely in the dark about, even today.” — Fast Company
