Goodbye Facebook

Facebook is a shitty company, that’s the bottom line here.

I’ve been working in web software for five years and studied computer science for another four and I can tell you that the scandals Facebook has had go beyond simple mistakes and are simply a symptom of a company who has no humanitarian values or core goodness.

I know that’s a spicy opening so let me be clear, I know there are good people in every company and this isn’t a specific blame on any one individual person, or even a group of people. What I think is wrong is something more cultural, something that is not so tangible but still exists in the air and that allows bad decisions to pass without and common sense checks that put the public before the business.

This is about privacy, about one company having too much power and influence over people and their data. It’s going to be really hard for me to remove Facebook products from my life, and in truth one less person using those services isn’t going to matter.

The buck has to stop with the people running the company and those advocates and good people inside the company need to be given the empowerment to do what is right for the wider public.