David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…In part, you can see why Facebook massively prefers the ad-based business model of we never even expose any information to you advertiser. You target and then we just deliver the ads. You never get to know anything about who the users are on our platform. We don’t sell data. That is a true fact whenever they stand up there and say we don’t sell data. They don’t. They sell the opportunity to target users. But in fact if they did sell data, it would be a bad thing because someone that could then build a competitor. The asset that they have is actually their data that they choose not to sell for business reasons. Totally. Then there’s this whole other layer too here of, well why did they do this in the first place? Why did developers have access to so much data? They were building platform, they were building an entirely different business with a different strategy. Now they’re an advertising- and media-based business. We’re almost talking about two totally different companies here as I think we’ve told in the story. I do think, when I search my heart of hearts though, when I was developing apps in the 2010 period and would let people use Facebook Connect or whatever the current branding of accessing Facebook accounts was at the time, I was always like, whoa, this is a lot of data that comes with someone clicking that button.…

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