Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Vox Popoli: Forget Facebook - It's all Idka now.


It's all Idka now. As the Brainstormers know, we've been trying out a new Swedish Facebook alternative called Idka. It has a lot of advantages over Facebook, particularly because they don't use your data, sell your data, or invade your privacy. Better yet, they let you control your groups and organizations very strictly. It's got chat too.

We've already got an Arkhaven organization there which we're using in a quasi-Dropbox capacity and I've set up an ELOE group there as well, so if you're not interested in having Mark Zuckerberg sell the pictures of your cousin's children to sketchy companies in Turkey and Indonesia, I would strongly suggest getting off Facebook and giving Idka a whirl. You can find me there as well, and if you would like an invite to the ELOE group, let me know on Idka.

Just to be clear, I have no interest in Idka nor do I have anything to do with it, it's just a new tech company with a better (if occasionally esoteric) interface and a lack of interest in exploiting user data like a Muslim rape gang exploiting a drug-addicted 14-year-old British girl without a father in Rotherham.

In the long run, Facebook wants to make its product even more immersive and personal than it is now. It wants people to buy video chatting and personal assistant devices for their homes, and plans to announce those products this spring, say people familiar with the matter. It wants users to dive into Facebook-developed virtual worlds. It wants them to use Facebook Messenger to communicate with businesses, and to store their credit-card data on the app so they can use it to make payments to friends.

Employees have begun to worry that the company won’t be able to achieve its biggest goals if users decide that Facebook isn’t trustworthy enough to hold their data. At the meeting on Tuesday, the mood was especially grim. One employee told a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter that the only time he’d felt as uncomfortable at work, or as responsible for the world’s problems, was the day Donald Trump won the presidency.

It looks like Mark Zuckerberg is about to learn the difference between influence and power.

Lawmakers are demanding to hear directly from Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg on the growing controversy over the misuse of its data by Trump-linked Cambridge Analytica, as the social network confronts its most serious political crisis ever in Washington.

"I want to know why this happened, and what’s the extent of the damage, and how they’re going to fix it moving forward," Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said Tuesday when asked about the briefings. Facebook executives, she added, "aren’t coming yet, but they better come."

What Senator Klobuchar doesn't understand is that Facebook's business model, indeed, its entire existence, depends upon being able to violate her privacy concerns.