Google vs Facebook: Do No Evil

The recent kerfuffle over Facebook’s privacy contagion forced me to think in clear-eyed detail. What is it about Facebook that made me delete Facebook? Why is Facebook different to anyone else? There is only one answer to that: The Zuck.

Whenever you give out your email address in return for a free ebook, or some inside story, or just to hear about your local brewery’s latest beer offers, you make an unconscious assessment. Will they spam me? Will they sell my details? What this boils down to is: do you trust them? And if your trust turns out to be misplaced, what is the consequence? It’s usually nothing: you can always unsubscribe. Except if that someone is Facebook.

Facebook go out of their way to make it either impossible or very time-consuming to unsubscribe from their ad engine. It’s that ad engine that allows Facebook to make itself available to you for free, apart from all the hours you waste uploading photos of your coffee in that amazing cup that isn’t quite like any cup you ever saw before, it sort of has a weird thing going on with the handle and I just can’t wait for all my friends to see this and like it.

I once wrote a piece about Google. It said something like this: any company that needs to remind itself not to be evil should not be trusted. I was mistaken. I didn’t stop to think what they meant by evil. The funny thing about evil is that it means something different to everyone. Stealing my milk off the stoop is evil. Killing cats is evil. But I think what Google meant was: don’t forget to be human. What Google meant was: we understand we’re under huge pressure to make huge tons of dollars. Just don’t do it in a mean way.

What Google meant was: don’t be mean. Be open. Be charitable. Be kind.

Whenever I see Mark Zuckerberg hiding behind weird legalese in front of Congress, I shudder. I don’t shudder because I don’t like him. I don’t know him. The reason I shudder is that Mark Zuckerberg is the nicest person in the whole of Facebook. Everyone else, everyone, is like Andrew Bosworth. He’s the guy who said he didn’t mind if a few people died as long as Facebook kept growing. Remember that: whatever you think about The Zuck, he’s the least evil person they have.

I feel sorry for him. He’s created something so successful that he wishes he never thought of it. That’s a bitter pill for a tech startup to swallow. It’s terrible. Nobody wants to be that successful. Not even Bill Gates has as many users as Facebook. Facebook is a data harvesting company. And it turns out virtually the entire Western internet-connected world was just waiting for the day they had their life’s contents harvested.

Until they didn’t.

Is Facebook more like Google or more like AOL? I think they are more like AOL. More like MySpace. Apple has realised it has to move away from hardware. Everyone who wants some Apple kit bought it already or can’t afford it, so Apple moved into services. Everyone who wants a Gmail account has one, so Google moved into hardware. Facebook has no hardware. Their hardware is you.

The bottom line, the reason I keep my Gmail account but removed myself from Facebook is trust. I know Google’s business model. I know Apple’s model. I understand Microsoft’s. I don’t have half a clue what Facebook is doing with your information. And worse than that, neither does Mark Zuckerberg.