Sunday Dialogue: Online Profits and Privacy | Internet Privacy And ...

The Letter

To a Editor:

Facebook has stumbled out of a starting gate. Some insiders cashed out early, though a long-term investors are nervous. Can a company?s increase clear a valuation? But a Faceback charity raises bigger questions.

Written tellurian communications have mostly changed from a post bureau to a Internet, most of it flitting by Google, Facebook and Twitter. But should a world?s communications infrastructure be owned and operated by a few for-profit companies?

When Congress combined a postal complement in a 18th century, it suspicion categorically about this doubt and motionless that democracy indispensable a open noncommercial communications system. It even taboo competing private companies.

Even some-more discouraging than for-profit tenure is a structure of a Facebook business model. Facebook?s fiduciary responsibilities are to a promotion business and to a investors. The users are a apparatus to be exploited. Facebook is primed to find ways to cave a user information and communications for profit, even if this conflicts with a interests of a users.

Ironically, it?s substantially never been easier to build a nonprofit communications infrastructure. Wikipedia serves hundreds of millions of users with fewer than 100 paid employees and a business indication formed on donations. Could this indication be scaled adult for businesses a distance of Facebook and Google so we don?t need to concede privacy for profit?

If new story is any guide, a Facebook indication might good fail. So many onetime Internet darlings ? Yahoo, AOL, Netscape, Friendster, MySpace ? have unhappy long-term investors.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/opinion/sunday/sunday-dialogue-online-profits-and-privacy.html

modeselektor gran torino gloria steinem war of the worlds rock and roll hall of fame severe weather wichita