[microtonal]

Look, I know that nowdays it's popular to pay attention to security and privacy, and I understand that it's important. But can we for once not immediately assume ill intentions?

Not really. If I find it important to mention what I am watching or listening too, I can add it myself.

Obviously, the goals is not surveillance, since 15 seconds would be a too small amount of time. The goal is getting an even more fine-grained idea of your preferences for advertising.

A company who knows more and more about me, removing privacy one small step at a time, is creepy.

[rayalez]

I see your point, it's just.... Sometimes people do things simply to add a nice convenient feature.

People distrust big corporations, and that makes sense to a degree. But if I imagine a team of programmers that work on that stuff, when I visualise actual human beings that make the decisions, I have very hard time believing that this is the kind of thoughts that go through they heads.

Sure, maybe there's some manager somewhere who literally thinks "lets decrease people's privacy so we could squeeze extra few cents out of our users", I just believe that in 95% of cases it's just people like you and me, trying to do good things and build a new fun feature.

I understand your concern about the remaining 5%, but it seems unlikely to me in this case.

People who work at facebook probably have enough money to not be desperate about earning more, and to be free to focus on just making cool things. I think it's bad when everything google/apple/facebook/etc does is met with hostility, and in this particular case that reaction seems to be the result of group think, it isn't warranted by the information that we have.

[ssivark]

> People who work at facebook probably have enough money to not be desperate about earning more, and to be free to focus on just making cool things.

But Facebook as a company is under tremendous pressure to boost earnings! Facebook stock has a Price/Earnings ratio of about 70; that means that at the current rate of earning, it will take them 70 years to justify the value of the share price. There's no way shareholders are going to be willing to wait that long. Strong market forces are pushing Facebook to quickly grow profits, and in that process, privacy just happens to be an externality that's not worth protecting.

All employees will definitely feel the pressure (directly or indirectly) to contribute to profits, because Facebook management "owes" that to shareholders who've funded this whole operation (under current market ideology).

[forgetsusername]

It isn't that complicated.

Facebook's whole business model is predicated on collecting vast amounts of personal data and selling you advertising. Every feature they add is a means to that end. All of them.

[jsjohnst]

The thing I think you are missing is that once the feature exists, it can be misused, even if unintentionally by Facebook. A malicious employee could abuse their trusted position, a government level actor could intercept the transmission, a hacker could break in and dump them, etc. These are all very real scenarios that have happened before.

[dagw]

People who work at facebook probably have enough money to not be desperate about earning more

Based on casual observation of my surroundings, some of the highest earners I know are also the ones that are the most desperate to keep and grow their earnings.