It reminds me of the Snowden leaks about mass surveillance programs like PRISM. I think most technical people expected something like that to exist ever since the internet became mainstream. Still, if it's just an "educated rumor" without hard evidence there's not much for the media to talk about. Up until now you could only say "it seems pretty likely that Facebook is doing something like that, but we don't know for sure". That's not enough to make an article and that's not enough to convince the general populace apparently.
In general it's pretty amazing how trusting the average human being seems to be as soon as computer are involved. I suppose that it's mostly out of ignorance and complacency. People seem a lot more careful when physical mail is involved than emails for instance. They also don't hesitate to share extremely intimate details about their private lives with a faceless corporation. Some of my friends willingly opt into streaming their position in real time continuously through their smartphones. That's terrifying to me but apparently very convenient for them. I think Zuckerberg agrees with my sentiment since that's the source of his "dumb fucks" comment.
I hope these articles will help change that mentality but I'm not overly optimistic. I read a comment on a forum earlier today that basically said "screw Facebook, I'll close my account and do everything from WhatsApp instead". I don't think it was sarcastic.
In general it's pretty amazing how trusting the average human being seems to be as soon as computer are involved. I suppose that it's mostly out of ignorance and complacency. People seem a lot more careful when physical mail is involved than emails for instance. They also don't hesitate to share extremely intimate details about their private lives with a faceless corporation. Some of my friends willingly opt into streaming their position in real time continuously through their smartphones. That's terrifying to me but apparently very convenient for them. I think Zuckerberg agrees with my sentiment since that's the source of his "dumb fucks" comment.
I hope these articles will help change that mentality but I'm not overly optimistic. I read a comment on a forum earlier today that basically said "screw Facebook, I'll close my account and do everything from WhatsApp instead". I don't think it was sarcastic.