To be fair, there are generally two reasons for these kinds of predictions:
1. People in a bubble think something is way more important than it is. I hate to say it but user data privacy is in this category. Like 1% of people actually care about this. I'm not saying that's right but it's true; and
2. People who make a lot of noise about an issue to make people care or to bring about some desired outcome. Think Yelp complaining about Google "stealing" their content.
The second can be really harmful too. A good example is articles posted about how [high X]% of people have suffered from "sexual harassment or assault". To be clear, both of those things are bad but they are different levels of bad. Cat-calling on a construction site shouldn't be treated equivalently as a violent assault.
But people do it to make things seem more alarming than they actually are and I think it has the negative effect. These bad faith arguments actually turn people off.
It also leads to situations like a 19 year old having sex with a 16 year old is on the same sexual offender list as a child molestor.
I digress.
The only thing you see here is that the Economist doesn't like Facebook. That's it. I mean there's some bad PR for FB recently but companies have survived much, much worse for much, much longer. And FB will continue to attract talent as long as they pay them.
To be fair, there are generally two reasons for these kinds of predictions:
1. People in a bubble think something is way more important than it is. I hate to say it but user data privacy is in this category. Like 1% of people actually care about this. I'm not saying that's right but it's true; and
2. People who make a lot of noise about an issue to make people care or to bring about some desired outcome. Think Yelp complaining about Google "stealing" their content.
The second can be really harmful too. A good example is articles posted about how [high X]% of people have suffered from "sexual harassment or assault". To be clear, both of those things are bad but they are different levels of bad. Cat-calling on a construction site shouldn't be treated equivalently as a violent assault.
But people do it to make things seem more alarming than they actually are and I think it has the negative effect. These bad faith arguments actually turn people off.
It also leads to situations like a 19 year old having sex with a 16 year old is on the same sexual offender list as a child molestor.
I digress.
The only thing you see here is that the Economist doesn't like Facebook. That's it. I mean there's some bad PR for FB recently but companies have survived much, much worse for much, much longer. And FB will continue to attract talent as long as they pay them.