Activist Groups Launch Campaign to Remove Mark Zuckerberg from Board

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Yesterday, two activist groups launched a campaign to remove Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook’s board of directors.

Digital civil rights group Color of Change and Majority Action, a corporate accountability organization, told the Securities and Exchange Commission that they will be urging Facebook shareholders to withhold their support for nominating Zuckerberg to the board.

The two groups argue that Facebook’s corporate structure gives Zuckerberg “control without adequate checks,” pointing out that he is CEO and holds 57.7 percent of voting rights in the company.

Leaked Facebook Documents Show how Mark Zuckerberg Plays Dirty

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Leaked Facebook documents that include emails, chats, presentations, spreadsheets, and meeting summaries show how Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s board and management team played dirty.

Zuckerberg, along with his board and management team, found ways to tap Facebook’s trove of user data — including information about friends, relationships and photos — as leverage over companies it partnered with.

In some cases, Facebook would reward favored companies by giving them access to the data of its users. In other cases, it would deny user-data access to rival companies or apps.

Basically, everything Facebook has said in public, they are doing the exact opposite in private.

Mark Zuckerberg Ruined the Internet. Now He Pretends to Care About It

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Mark Zuckerberg is at it again with another essay. This time he says that the internet needs to be regulated and thinks Congress should focus on four areas first. Roger McNamee gives his thoughts on it.

Mark Zuckerberg’s recent opinion piece in the Washington Post is a monument to insincerity and misdirection. The essay offers proposals to address four important issues – harmful content, election protection, privacy and data protection, and data portability – but each proposal is transparently self-serving.

Facebook vs Snapchat is Like Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates

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Facebook’s so-called “pivot to privacy” has elicited a number of reactions. One of the more incisive ones comes from Kara Swisher. In a New York Times Sunday review column, Ms. Swisher compared Facebook’s attempts to bolster private messaging, in direct competition with Snapchat, to the battle between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. In that case, Mr. Jobs’s “stunning creativity” eventually “won out.” This time, the size of Facebook may mean Mr. Zuckerberg can make a success of the Snapchat model. If he really means it.

Mr. Zuckerberg is to Bill Gates as Mr. Spiegel is to Steve Jobs. Mr. Jobs always had better ideas and vision than Mr. Gates. But Apple spent a long time in dire straits while he pushed his high-level concepts about security, privacy, and design and simplicity. Mr. Gates, on the other hand, was an unqualified genius at business models and systems, and he clearly understood the depressing truth that good enough was good enough for a lot of consumers.

That Ominous Figure in the Corner of Your Digital Living Room is Mark Zuckerberg

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Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be your “digital living room” where you can privately share your thoughts, messages, and photos of your kids that the company will use for advertising purposes. Which was a topic left out of his essay on his new “privacy-focused vision.”

I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform — because frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we’ve historically focused on tools for more open sharing. But we’ve repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories.

Facebook Shuts Down Onavo Spyware...We Think

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Facebook is shutting down its Onavo spyware VPN and associated “research” app. That is, if you believe anything Facebook says.

To preempt any more scandals around Onavo and the Facebook Research app and avoid Google stepping in to forcibly block the apps, Facebook is now taking Onavo off the Play Store and stopping recruitment of Research testers. That’s a surprising voluntary move that perhaps shows Facebook is finally getting in tune with the public perception of its shady actions.

Eh, I wouldn’t go that far. Not with Facebook blaming users when it screws them over.

Facebook Lets You Search for Photos of Your Female Friends

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Matthew Hughes writes about how Facebook lets you search for photos of your female friends, but not your male friends. Not that you should creep on guys either, though.

Facebook lets you search for photos of your female friends, but refuses to play dice if you want to look up pictures of your male friends. The bizarre find was discovered this weekend by notorious Belgian white-hat hacker Inti De Ceukelaire.

Every time I ask myself, “Can Facebook get any more toxic?” The answer is YES. It’s as if Mark Zuckerberg is competing to be the Worst Person in America.

Facebook Research Broke the Rules. Now it Faces the Consequences

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Casey Newton wrote a defense of Facebook/attack of Apple, because of the Facebook Research app that got banned.

But for all the attention we’re paying to Facebook’s moves here, I hope we spare at least as much for Apple. If Tim Cook can wreak this much havoc on Facebook’s day, however justified, just imagine what power Apple holds over the rest of us.

That power is App Store rules, which Facebook willfully ignored. We should be glad that big companies have to follow the same rules as small companies. If you’re a Facebook employee unable to use internal apps, don’t be mad at Apple. Instead, be mad at your employer who was willing to throw it all away in order to take advantage of children.

What Mark Zuckerberg Really Meant in his Wall Street Journal Piece

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

There has been a lot of reaction to *that* Mark Zuckerberg piece in the Wall Street Journal last week. The Facebook CEO and founder tried to allay users’ fears about how the service uses their data. TMO’s Andrew Orr described it as “tone deaf,” which seems pretty on the money to me. Kara Swisher used her New York Times column Friday to rewrite the column and explain to readers what Zuckerberg really mean. Not surprisingly, it is funny, cutting, and well worth a read.

The post was essentially the greatest hits that we have heard Mr. Zuckerberg sing for a while now. He focused on the enormous advertising system that powers Facebook, while ignoring almost entirely the news from the last disastrous year, including Russian abuse of the platform, sloppy management of data, recent revelations that the company throws some pretty sharp elbows when it needs to, and more. You kind of get why Mr. Zuckerberg would want to forget it all.

Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram to be Integrated

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zucerkberg plans to integrate Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and, Instagram. A detailed report in the New York Times said that the move could happen at the end of 2019 or 2020. Mr. Zuckerberg reportedly wants all the services to use end-to-end encryption. It would mean that a user with a Messenger account, could send an encrypted message to a user with just a WhatsApp account, for instance.

By stitching the apps’ infrastructure together, Mr. Zuckerberg wants to increase the utility of the social network, keeping its billions of users highly engaged inside its ecosystem. If people turn more regularly to Facebook-owned properties for texting, they may forgo rival messaging services, such as those from Apple and Google, said the people, who declined to be identified because the moves are confidential. If users interact more frequently with Facebook’s apps, the company may also be able to build up its advertising business or add new services to make money, they said.