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It all comes down to Wall Street. As long as investors are OK with FB's shenanigans, they'll continue to find innovative ways to sell off their users.


Which is a bit of a mug's game, as most investors are explicitly about profits. Externalities be damned.

I would much rather see industries self-regulate. But I have big concerns about industries where people are mainly the product, not the customer. I think it breaks the key feedback loop that makes most self-regulation work: irritable users/customers.

For me America's best backup to irritable customers has always been class action suits. It allows aggrieved customers to band together and force accountability where otherwise individual harm would be too small to justify the costs of a lawsuit. But mandatory arbitration is breaking that too, and anyway doesn't work as well when users aren't customers.

So if we don't have user-fueled self-regulation, and we don't have class action, then I'm not sure what we can do short of government regulation. It's a last resort for me, but nothing else seems to have worked on Facebook.




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