Reid Hoffman, thank you for a well written article and an honest account on how a company you trusted and believed in by investing in them, turned out to be not so, as you say, ‘honorable’. This word can be so subjective in the English language.
Is making money out of people’s data an honorable practice? You will, no doubt, have seen the statements made by Mark Zuckerberg suggesting that he doesn’t sell people’s data, which of course is a complete lie and what I would regard as a dishonorable statement to make, because that’s exactly what Facebook does.
Yes of course you can dress it up, as he regularly does, but when you look at the advertiser’s dashboard you will see that the advertisers can target individuals based on all the data Facebook has collected on it’s users with laser accuracy. Now you might say, well, people just give their data willingly. Of course you can, but as Facebook and other platforms, like LinkedIn, regularly convince you to add more details through the use of notifications, persuasion tactics and gamification scoring, the public at large have been conditioned to follow the herd and complete all of the suggested details, in order to get rid of all the pop-up notifications at the very least.
And there you have it. A very dishonorable way of behaving in order to make billions from advertisers and possibly users too without anything in return for the user.
As a co-founder of LinkedIn, you may like to begin by contemplating whether you truly believe that they conduct themselves in an honorable way by using it’s data of millions in order to sell that data to recruiters, marketers, sales professionals and small businesses.
That’s just business you might say, very clever business. As we enter 2019 and can see that Facebook’s growth is slowing, more folks are deleting Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, as they are in the same family, it will only be a matter of time before we examine LinkedIn more closely too and consider how they are using our data without any compensation.
It’s time companies like Facebook and LinkedIn share their so-called earnings with the people that have given their data so willingly in order that a few founders and directors, together with shareholders bank the billions.
It’s time, as you say, to only invest our data with those ‘honorable’ companies.
#justsaying
