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Lying — or at least not telling the whole truth — as a business model comes to haunt Meta
When a major inflection point passes through, institutions and the environment take a long time to catch up. But when they do, the consequences can be swift. Facebook’s current troubles illustrate this principal.
My editor reacted with shock when I handed in Chapter 1 of my most recent book Seeing Around Corners. The reason? I said, back in 2018, that Facebook (now Meta) was overdue for a reckoning. “You think Facebook is going to get into trouble?” he asked me, incredulous. I said absolutely that it was.
Here’s what I wrote at the time: “The business model underlying this vast revenue source is completely opaque to many who, the data brokers argue, willingly give up their information to obtain the benefits of using these platforms for free. Most of us, however, are oblivious to the specifics of how our most personal data is being used in ways that never were economically or physically feasible before the digital revolution.”
And… “just logging on to the internet creates a digital footprint that tells interested parties about your on-line behavior. While users are dimly aware that web sites track them using cookies, what many are not aware of is what are called third party cookies. For instance, if you logged onto a news site and that site has…
