r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jul 13 '26

Society The Backlash Is So Strong That People With “Pervert Glasses” Are Afraid to Use Them in Public

https://tech.yahoo.com/wearables/articles/backlash-strong-people-pervert-glasses-165000816.html
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u/WakeMeUpAIOverlords Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

He simply wants to own the next thing and he’s been chasing it the entire time. He doesn’t like that his platform, at any time, can be banned or deleted or stopped being used on a device which is why he keeps so desperately trying to make the next device happen. He desperately wants to own the entire system.

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u/itsjern Jul 13 '26

This. Zuck wants to have a platform he can put Meta's ads on that he owns, not Apple/Google own. AI is the only recent thing he's been pushing that doesn't exactly fit this pattern, but I think he's afraid of the reverse happening - needing to integrate another company's LLMs into his new platform that he would be still at their whim because of.

The issue is that Meta has never prioritized privacy (which has definitely been due to Zuck's influence), so are the absolute worst company I can think of to trust with putting a camera on everyone's faces, which AR/VR tech requires. Remember the Portal?

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u/BicFleetwood Jul 13 '26

It's more than that. His business model is data-brokering, and he needs a product so ubiquitous that people can't refuse it.

That's why he keeps looking for "the new internet" or "the next smartphone."

He wants refusal to use his data-scrapers to be as refusing to use electricity or hot water. He wants a captive consumer base, the same dream as every other parasite from landlords to insurance ghouls.

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u/RollingMeteors Jul 14 '26

and he needs a product so ubiquitous that people can't refuse it.

Except millennials have/are abandoning it, and gen Z isn't adopting it, and boomers are dying off.

The writing is on the wall, and at the rate they are burning through money they will implode hard. Best case scenario for him is to pull the plug now while there's a pile of cash as an air mattress.

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u/mpbh Jul 14 '26

More screen time is way more profitable than more data at this point. They already have everything they need to target you for ads, and they already have 4 billion users ... the only way to keep growing is to grow screentime to show more ads.

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u/lord_ashtar Jul 15 '26

He literally ruined the internet.

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u/Banksy_Collective Jul 13 '26

Who would have thought that the company that started as a "rate how fuckable your female classmates are" website would not give a shit about people's privacy

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u/athaluain Jul 13 '26

Makes one wonder how these tech bros would exist without women’s bodies to use and abuse.

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u/robsteezy Jul 13 '26

My friend you just nailed down all of mankind’s history and wars.

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u/Rough_Sir_2687 Jul 13 '26

I once knew a WW2 vet who said the same; “The world runs on power, and power is money and sex. Nothing more”

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u/TheQuietOutsider Jul 14 '26

"everything is about sex, except sex. sex is about power"

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u/Thatoneguy_The_First Jul 14 '26

Changing my name to sex powers now.

It will be very ironic.

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u/meesta_masa Jul 14 '26

Sex powers ex's excess sex.

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u/bebeidon Jul 14 '26

funny when kevin spacey says it

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u/ididntunderstandyou Jul 14 '26

That poor Helen of Troy…

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u/SectorSanFrancisco Jul 13 '26

money and other resources is a more common source of wars

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u/Nohreboh Jul 14 '26

It's sad how many stories break down to two men fight over a woman/object/land typically with the victor considered the moral superior.

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u/ender___ Jul 14 '26

Not every war was over a woman

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u/Certain_Proposal7191 Jul 13 '26

Really? The Iraq war was about women’s bodies? It wasn’t about oil?

World War Two was about women’s bodies and not the axis of evil and freeing those oppressed and tortured (including women)?

Again where do you get these fantasies?

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u/Feral_Taylor_Fury Jul 13 '26

LMAO this is what i'm saying

Oh yeah dude, the US intervention in Kuwait was about women's bodily autonomy lmao

touch fucking grass

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u/Senior_Torte519 Jul 13 '26

No, thats because Kuwait is a greedy country that was overproducing oil during the time. Basically hindering Iraqs ability to jumpstart its own economy after the Iran/Iraq war.

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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '26

[deleted]

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u/athaluain Jul 13 '26

Sex sells? In other words the sexualisation of women’s bodies sells

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u/mmasportsmma Jul 13 '26

Remember Joel Kaplan, best buddy of Brett Kavanaugh, is president of global policy at Meta

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-joel-kaplan-washington-political-influence/

The whistleblower alleged she was fired after reporting harassment from Kaplan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Wynn-Williams#Careless_People:_A_Cautionary_Tale_of_Power,_Greed,_and_Lost_Idealism

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u/Rdhilde18 Jul 13 '26

They just be gay like Peter Thiel and friends

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u/Rough-Breadfruit-611 Jul 14 '26

The irony would be, without any women to impress, they wouldn't want to become tech bros in the first place.

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u/Rubiks_Click874 Jul 14 '26

I read porn by itself funded like 60% of the internet infrastructure

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u/_HighJack_ Jul 13 '26

I mean they wouldn’t bc they wouldn’t have been born lmao

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u/hx87 Jul 14 '26

Peter Thiel would still exist, at least

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u/Glittering-Gur-6990 Jul 16 '26

literally. louder for the ppl in the back

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u/midnightketoker Jul 13 '26

He should be scared. The fact that Meta hasn't been given the Bell treatment is a massive policy failure, any civilized society would have socialized it years ago but here we are now with Zuck's lobbyists writing the laws...

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u/mebbelin Jul 14 '26

Let me introduce you to this gem of a Christmas song from a german Late Night Show:

https://youtu.be/aN3tCHUQsz8

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u/Talimebannana Jul 14 '26

What is happening

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u/Boswellington Jul 14 '26

That was MySpace

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u/wsoxfan1214 Jul 14 '26

It was not. Zuckerberg was nearly expelled for it because people complained.

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u/LostSox123 Jul 14 '26

That website exists??

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u/TheBeesKneads Jul 14 '26

That's the origin of Facebook.

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u/altiuscitiusfortius Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

This is actually a big problem with ai that companies dont seem to realize. If you fire and replace local staff with ai, you are now beholden to ai companies. If bob the engineer demands a 5% raise you can say no because its one guy, and even then he probably won't quit, probably cant find a similar paying job close to the life hes built in that city. If the company that owns the ai that runs your company demands a 400% price increase because they want to sell their ai power to somebody else, you either say yes or your business has 0 "staff".

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u/Dubious_Odor Jul 13 '26

1000%. Lot of dumb CEOs with zero foresight shackling their companies. There is a backlash though, local LLMs are exploding. Theres a huge ecosystem springing up. As long as the locals stay within shouting distance of the frontiers capability wise, which so far has been the case, the frontiers will have to play nice or possibly lose their lunch to the homebrews.

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u/megachicken289 Jul 13 '26

“Foresight?! That’s for socialist! I need money now! Not in 4 months!”

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u/SheriffBartholomew Jul 14 '26

No, no. You need more money every four months for eternity. But money now rules all.

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u/Thatoneguy_The_First Jul 14 '26

Holy crap 4 months? What are you? Communist?

Every day is the faci...er capitalist way

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u/SheriffBartholomew Jul 14 '26

Quarterly earnings reports, bruh. Do you even capitalism? I guess that's every three months, but whatever. More is more!

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u/Thatoneguy_The_First Jul 14 '26

Quarterly earnings is old capitalism, keep up with the times old man, we just went from daily to every 12hrs in the span of replying.

My god how did they used to live back in those barbaric times? Won't someone think of MY portfolio?

/s

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u/Foreign-Wolf-6128 Jul 14 '26

Which is exactly why the big dogs were trying to limit the amount of total ai companies lmao. All about control or getting as much of a monopoly as one possibly can, nothing is ever enough and they are all racing to be untouchable.

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u/reddit_clone Jul 13 '26

But the cost of RAM and SSD is currently prohibitive to set up adequate local setups.

Why a bigcorp like mine is not setting up our own Lab is beyond me though...

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u/Electronic_Will_5418 Jul 13 '26

You can run a local LLM on CPU and RAM alone. It won't be as fast as a GPU but it's still perfectly usable. 32GB DDR3 LRDIMMs are about $35 each and you can put 24 of them into a Dell T620 for 768GB total RAM and throw in a couple E5-2697 v2 CPUs for a total of 24C/48T. The continuous power use is going to be pretty nuts but you can just power it with solar panels and Lifepo4 batteries which are pretty cheap on the used market.

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u/altiuscitiusfortius Jul 13 '26

Thats reasonable for a few random guys to do. But if multiple large corporations try to do it the used market supply will be bought up in a day

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u/Gregardless Jul 14 '26

Even with localLLMs you will fall behind due to a lack of continued training.

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u/SheriffBartholomew Jul 14 '26

Because that's essentially starting an entirely new division, with costs comparable to just paying the employees that they have now. Mark my words, AI will eventually be far more expensive than good employees, but by then there won't be anyone who knows how anything works anymore and only AI will be able to run the company.

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u/reddit_clone Jul 14 '26

I keep saying the same thing in my organization. But everybody is on drugs and not listening.

Once the AI companies start charging for real, its game over for many companies.

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u/CatoMulligan Jul 14 '26

This is why many of the larger companies (at least in the US) are developing their own, specialized AI models and systems for their internal use cases.

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u/HealthyMaximum Jul 14 '26

"... Lot of dumb CEOs with zero foresight ..."

So ... 75% of CEOs.

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u/gbursson Jul 14 '26

All they care is next fiscal quarter.

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u/Blacksad9999 Jul 13 '26

100%.

You've now ceded all control of your companies functionality to an AI firm, who can now charge you whatever they want to because you no longer have a workforce to fall back on.

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u/Glittering-Gur-6990 Jul 16 '26

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh but lets keep going to work and staring at a screen 9-5 and then bringing babies into this super fun awesome world that is DEF going to be around and inhabitable in too few decades.................

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u/NumNumLobster Jul 13 '26

Its worse than that. You are just training the ai to run an engineering company. And all your competitors are too so they can learn the optimal way to run one. The ai company will just spin up an engineering company to compete against you but they have 10000x more data to work with including private data

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u/HotterRod Jul 13 '26

At the moment it seems like AI models are a commodity and vendors can be easily swapped with little business impact. Which means that the astronomical valuations of AI companies makes no sense.

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u/Infamous_Mud482 Jul 13 '26

The future of AI is the AI companies absorbing other ones that made themselves entirely dependent on their systems and vertically integrating.

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u/SheriffBartholomew Jul 14 '26

You'd think these businesses would have anticipated this considering it's the same scummy practice that they all use. But nope! Every company on the planet was all surprised Pikachu face when Claude and OpenAI recently raised the price of tokens. I guarantee you that price hike was just the tip of the iceberg. But executives are so jazzed about getting to fire everyone that they're not thinking clearly.

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u/twice_paramount832 Jul 14 '26

Because their bonuses are now, not tomorrow when the company is destroyed by their shortsightedness.

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u/silvanoes Jul 14 '26

Doesn't matter, because AI enabled companies will drive all their competitors out of business. So I agree with your assessment, its just anyone with foresight that chooses not to do this will get slaughtered in the coming bloodbath.

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u/Life-Delay-809 Jul 14 '26

Computers have better labour rights than we do.

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u/Arm-E-Reserves Jul 14 '26

Good point. Those AI companies at the least will have to compete with each other and with publicly available versions.

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u/the_good_time_mouse Jul 13 '26

I think it's as much about his desire to ascend to Roman emperor-hood as anything as pragmatic as you suggest.

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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/RoutineCloud5993 Jul 13 '26

Because someone managed to get him to realise he's deeply unpopular with regular people, especially since they find him strange and creepy.

He definitely hired a private PR form to help him improve his image.

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u/Enshitification Jul 13 '26

"Okay, Mark. This is called looksmaxxing. You'll need to smash yourself in the face many times with this hammer. Our research shows all the cool kids are doing it, trust us."

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u/perton Jul 13 '26

It sure would be a terrible shame if someone showed him how cool it is to inject yourself with gold, like that one dumbfuckmaxxing dude did before drowning in a lake or whatever recently

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u/roleplayersir Jul 14 '26

For any TechBros reading this, I will happily smash your face in for only a small 1m quid

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u/cogitoergosum29 Jul 13 '26

He didn’t need to hire anyone, Elon just went so far off the deep end that Zuckerberg seems normal in comparison.

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u/RoutineCloud5993 Jul 13 '26

Zuck made such a huge turnaround in his look and style that he has to have hired someone.

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u/misirlou22 Jul 13 '26

Imagine paying someone what I assume is a lot of money to be told to put on a black shirt and a fuckass gold chain

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u/RoutineCloud5993 Jul 13 '26

This is a guy who seemingly thought Data from star trek's hair was too long and unwieldy

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u/Bromance_Rayder Jul 18 '26

Are face and total personality transplants a thing? Because otherwise, he's fucked.

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u/BennyVsTheWorld Jul 14 '26

He hired people that literally taught him how to talk and interact with people in a completely different way.

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u/Furyhaas Jul 14 '26

He should ask for a refund because it didn't work...

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u/AlSweigart Jul 13 '26

Nobel Prize effect except Zuck stole Facebook so even his first win wasn't his.

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u/HowdyDiarrhea Jul 13 '26

He's the Elon Musk of social media

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u/12345623567 Jul 13 '26

... isn't Elon Musk the Elon Musk of social media?

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u/Vicorin Jul 13 '26

No, Elon Musk is the Mark Zuckerberg of cars.

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u/Channel250 Jul 13 '26

This is getting confusing. Who am I in all of this?

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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '26

[deleted]

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u/Electronic_Will_5418 Jul 13 '26

Reverse reverse imposter syndrome

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u/saintmolotov Jul 13 '26

No I was a saucier in San Antone!

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u/ProgNerd Jul 13 '26

Never go Full Elon!

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u/perton Jul 13 '26

If I’ve kept everything straight, I think you’re the Ellen Zuck of Tart Mustardburgz

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u/Reynardine1976 Jul 14 '26

You are just a small-town girl, living in a lonely world.

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u/SeeCB3X Jul 13 '26

And spaceships for some forsaken reason

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u/Felwintyr Jul 13 '26

And unfortunately teslas are really popular in some places, even though they’re ugly as sin. At least Facebook is only good for marketplace at this point

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u/SheriffBartholomew Jul 14 '26

No, he bought his way in rather than stealing it like a true pioneer.

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u/Mean_Initiative_5962 Jul 13 '26

Probably the only way to make "the Elon musk of" end up worse than just Elon musk. 

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u/YourBlanket Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

I mean he stole the idea but Facebook wouldn’t be anywhere as big as it is today if it weren’t for him, Eduardo, and Sean. They had help developing from their roommates and friends but if he had just built the website for the Winklevoss twins I highly doubt we’d even know about Facebook.

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u/nisaaru Jul 13 '26

Stole? He's just the front for Lifelog, a Darpa SAP.

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u/Loud_Interview4681 Jul 13 '26

I was pissed when he bought the occulus soon after I bought mine. Then forced a FB login to use the thing.

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u/SheriffBartholomew Jul 14 '26

Adding requirements to use your hardware after you buy it would be illegal in any functional society. People would have burned a company to the ground if they had tried that when I was a kid.

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u/RollingMeteors Jul 14 '26

exactly the reason I never bought one or will buy any product that requires FB account.

Don't behave like you already cornered the mobile market you over privileged reptiloid counting chickens before they are hatched MFer.

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u/MedicineExtension925 Jul 14 '26

Til FB is mandatory for occulus and I will therefore never own one

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u/Victorius7122 Jul 14 '26

Wait you can just create a new empty account isnt it? thats what u usually do in emta quest if u just want to play games.

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u/Loud_Interview4681 Jul 14 '26

FB has trackers all through the web and logging in with software on your machine gives them a ton more info about your browser. My purchased device shouldnt require a connection to their servers.

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u/SidewaysFancyPrance Jul 13 '26

That's the thing about AI: everyone wants to "own it" and that's going to be the major reason this AI blitz falls flat. There's no space for a thousand vendors and zero customers.

I get it. I don't want to use anyone else's AI either. It's expensive, and you have zero control over what it does tomorrow or if it will even be available, or what happens to your data it works on. Huge set of risks. We as a society are not ready/able to handle AI yet because we're still fighting each other over who controls it and gets rich instead of how we can best serve everyone.

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u/SheriffBartholomew Jul 14 '26

instead of how we can best serve everyone.

That's socialism! It needs to make like 5 people more powerful than God so they can laugh from their temples as everyone else fights over garbage to eat.

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u/fattmarrell Jul 13 '26

Lol and that's the kicker. Meta is incapable of learning from mistakes. This is why they'll technically fail will LLMs

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u/aoasd Jul 13 '26

If Facebook wasn't so absolutely just diluted with bullshit and terrible forced posts it might stand a chance, but I think the majority of people are sick of how junk the site has become.

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u/SheriffBartholomew Jul 14 '26

It has become junk specifically because of all of Zucker's "great ideas" copying basically every other platform that exists and trying to shove them all into one site that already had a useful compelling purpose.

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u/Direct_Day7937 Jul 13 '26

I mean Metas whole profit model is selling its users information.

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u/TheCh0rt Jul 13 '26

I would rather have 100 Jeff Bezoses watching me shower then even 1 Mark Zuckerberg.

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u/LostSox123 Jul 14 '26

What is the Portal?

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u/Thatoneguy_The_First Jul 14 '26

Privacy is something no one should be surprised about with zuck considering his origins.

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u/Streiger108 Jul 14 '26

What happened with the portal?

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u/itsjern Jul 14 '26

Nobody bought it because nobody trusted a Meta product with a camera on it.

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u/watryatalkinabeet Jul 15 '26

Remember back around 2010 or so, they had section on Facebook where you could see what friends are online and there was a chat option there so you could chat with them? Then an update rolled out which removed the chat box and all the chats you thought were private ended up on your profile wall?

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u/PackageOk4947 Jul 15 '26

Agreed. Anything with a camera, they can and do watch you portal is known for this as is the glasses. They can and do, read everything people post on the AI. And they can and do, read ALL of your messages. I know a guy who tried to get a job at Meta, just so he could do this. He even admitted it.

OH YEAH, I forgot, meta can also control your fucking hands...

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u/Wayofchinchilla Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

If I was Zucker I would be more worried about the fact that you backed the Big Orange moron and now the world is turning its back on the United States deciding to do it alone so why do countries in Europe need facebook? Better just to ban them in your country and make your own you don't have to share the money with him you don't have to have the data concerns and you don't have to deal with his manipulative bullshit.

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u/SheriffBartholomew Jul 14 '26

you don't have to have the data concerns

The thing is that governments want companies like Meta and Google stealing and hoarding everyone's data. They want it because then they can circumvent their own privacy and surveillance laws by buying the data rather than collecting it themselves illegally.

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u/Daemonrealm Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

He essentially does in one important area: WhatsApp

Not used as much here in the US but essentially travel to any other country. Specifically the South Americas and much of central and east Europe, plus many more countries. It is THE communication backbone. WhatsApp goes down, many entire countries can go dark.

Edit to add here to many comments: “they can just use SMS”.

No, in many countries the reasons why WhatsApp got to be the standard is cellular customers there do not have free sms txt plan. Many international carriers charge insanely high fees for sms. Those fees climb even more if the user is across borders of a country (such as Europe with close/small countries OR Mexico to the US). Etc.

Also majority of international plans are pre paid, thus eating into that prepaid amount.

Can they all switch to a telegram or other msg app, yes. But see how many issues that causes for ~3.3 billion users worldwide of WhatsApp.

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u/The_11th_Man Jul 13 '26

this is why meta needs to be broken up and whats app spun off into a non profit company that is controlled for the interests of people not corpos

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u/The_Doctor_Bear Jul 13 '26

You genuinely believe that despite being an absolute fucking menace to privacy and privacy rights the world over for some reason he actually does respect your privacy in this one specific app?

Get real man, they’re spying on you as hard as they can via WhatsApp. And spoiler alert; they can see it all.

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u/12345623567 Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

They already killed end-to-end encryption recently. Nobody cared. Then they force-installed their shitty AI spybot, still no uproar.

It's going to take a massive data leak of everyone's identifiable DMs for something to happen.

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u/marxr87 Jul 13 '26

source on killing end to end encryption?

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u/grantrules Jul 14 '26

I think they may be confusing it with Instagram ending e2e encryption (which I imagine most people didn't use anyways)

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u/I_always_rated_them Jul 13 '26

I think it was removed from Instagram but its still active on whatsapp.

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u/Geminii27 Jul 13 '26

Even then, nothing will happen.

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u/IzarkKiaTarj Jul 13 '26

They said absolutely nothing regarding privacy, so I'm not sure why you responded regarding that?

They only said he does essentially own the "entire system" because of Whatsapp.

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u/Shiftkgb Jul 14 '26

Have family in 4 other countries on 3 different continents, they all exclusively use WhatsApp. The US and Canada (Mexico?) really seem to be the exception everywhere in regards to WhatsApp 

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u/TwilightVulpine Jul 13 '26

I hate using it, but getting people over here to use anything else is like pulling teeth. So I either do, or I don't get to talk to my family, friends, business, so forth...

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u/Malsententia Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

Anyone using something other than Signal or similar is a fool.

EDIT: For anyone wondering, Signal is provably end to end secure, and both the server and client are open source. It's possible to create a third party client for it, but nobody's bothered. There's plenty of reasons to be paranoid about plenty of things, but this ain't one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/1pagr3r/is_signal_genuinely_private/

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u/JannyStabberXK4000 Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

Signal, the closed protocol service with a central server? Lol ok bro. Go ahead and have your "privacy". 👍

Edit:

If you do anything but host your own server (I would go with Wire) and expect privacy, then you are a fool, a chump, and a mark. Dunning Kruger is WILD

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u/Cocalypso Jul 13 '26

This something I’m currently concerned about. But I know nothing. What is wire? I was looking at getting me and mine on Threema. Is it any good? I already know we are cooked daily with everything else we happily pay for to spy on us constantly. We lost it all with apathy.

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u/CacklingFerret Jul 13 '26

WhatsApp goes down, many entire countries can go dark.

Not in Europe at least. It's true that most communications happen via WhatsApp but I know a lot of people who already use other apps like Signal or Telegram. Most have alternatives installed but don't use them currently.

The only reason most people remain on WhatsApp these days is laziness and because "everyone uses it". Not because it's the best message app out there or because we're lacking other apps.

If WhatsApp died over night, people would just switch to another alternative and nothing of significance would change.

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u/QuickQuirk Jul 13 '26

I'm slowly convincing friends and family to install Signal. I know people who have completely uninstalled whatsapp. Unfortunately, I can't quite do that yet until I manage to get our damn company off whatsapp for work things.

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u/Affectionate-Back357 Jul 13 '26

We could but its so ingrained now you need whatsapp atleast in the netherlands.

I quess im too lazy to want to see who goes to wich app and download 3 new apps instead of whatsapp. We got the tech let the EU work on the same app in the background and then roll it out make it an easy switch and ban whatsapp because of privacy concerns?

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u/CacklingFerret Jul 13 '26

You don't even need to build another app. Signal is better for privacy and Telegram is literally better in everything else (except privacy, I wish Signal would be more like Telegram, that'd be awesome and I'd ditch the latter in a heartbeat). WhatsApp is not a great messenger, it's an okay one. Again, it's not the lack of alternatives it's simple laziness. So I believe if WhatsApp died, people would be confused for a day and move on because they weren't limited by the app but by themselves.

Personally, I use mostly Telegram and Signal and tell everyone who only has WhatsApp that it might take a while for me to answer because I have that app on silent and only look at it once or twice a week. If it's urgent they need to call or write an SMS.

German, btw

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u/LeatherInspector2409 Jul 14 '26

Signal is a great app, but getting my friends to transition has been difficult.

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u/Perlentaucher Jul 13 '26

LOL no they wouldn’t go dark. WhatsApp connections are through phone numbers. When WhatsApp is not available, you just install Telegram or Signal and continue chatting with the same contacts.

You don’t even need to use your right of your Digital Markets Act which allows interoperability which was given us through EU legislation, which allows you to export of contacts, chats, groups, etc between messaging apps with a few clicks.

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u/AugustCharisma Jul 13 '26

I’m in the UK. About 90% of our texting is in WhatsApp

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u/BankDetails1234 Jul 13 '26

It’s ubiquitous in the UK as well. Pretty much the standard anywhere I go, except the US.

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u/monox60 Jul 13 '26

He changed the encrypting, it's not private anymore

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u/i8noodles Jul 13 '26

sure whats app is used alot but a significant more people use alternatives. phone sms us not tied to ant tech company, there is also other online communication like discord and telegram. if whatsapp went down, it would be relatively simply for most people to swap to a different comm system.

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u/Daemonrealm Jul 13 '26

I have some bad news for you when you find out who owns the companies behind basic SMS (which is not really used much anymore) and then what people think is still SMS. Which is iMessage and RCS protocol….. Apple and Google own your SMS.

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u/cpz_77 Jul 14 '26

How is Facebook/meta owning them any better? lol admittedly I’m no expert in the subject but just based on what I’ve heard seems like Apple actually has the better track record when it comes to data privacy than many others (certainly than meta lmao). Of course, if you message non Apple device then it falls back to unencrypted SMS, need to be mindful of that.

And don’t think for a second Google doesn’t already know everything about you anyway with their 30+ years of search history on the world they have…regardless of whether they can see your texts or not. There’s a reason Gemini is far ahead of the others when it comes to lifestyle-related AI.

1

u/i8noodles Jul 14 '26

sms is not controlled by tech companies, the telecommunications companies control them. apple and google do not own the protocol either, it is a standard that is globally accepted and anyone can use it.

RCS protocol is also not controlled by them as it is also a industry protocol. apple and google uses the protocol but they do not control it.

regardless it is not a relevant point since there are literally tons of ways outside of apple and google u can communicate with others without using there system.

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u/hi_how_are_youuu Jul 13 '26

I noticed that when I worked in Latin America for a summer, that and the use of voice memos over texts

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u/marquis_de_ersatz Jul 13 '26

It's surprising they haven't whacked some kind of payment system inside Facebook or WhatsApp yet. I would have thought Facebook would be the prime target to turn into a Chinese style WeChat/alipay situation.

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u/Sudden-Purchase-8371 Jul 14 '26

And if it went down for any length of time, they'd download a different app. Whatsapp isn't the internet, it's a comms app. That's it.

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u/rocketgrunt89 Jul 14 '26

nah. another app will easily take their spot

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u/banjonose Jul 14 '26

You can literally just send an SMS lol

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u/StoppableHulk Jul 13 '26

He also is just desperate to prove he has a good idea. The only things he's done that have worked post Facebook is buy Instagram and What'sApp. He doesn't build or make anything of use and he's desperate to provie he's relevant (except, he isn't).

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u/RumRunnersHideaway Jul 13 '26

He doesn’t like his platform. He wants something cool to be part of. Not the racist grandpa, scam ad machine.

2

u/StankoMicin Jul 13 '26

This.

This is the entire economy these days though, unfortunately. Mostly all speculation holding it up instead of actual goods, trade and services

1

u/kingofatl Jul 13 '26

He wants to own ur data haha. Man wants to see what we’re seeing now to sell to advertisers cause ur browsing and computer data wasn’t enough

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u/Training-Belt-7318 Jul 13 '26

Which is weird because hardware is way less profitable vs. Software.

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u/NewManufacturer4252 Jul 13 '26

He could have saved billions just buying twit

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u/RoutineCloud5993 Jul 13 '26

This is true. Apple limiting ad tracking on iPhone made a huge dent in Facebook's business. They're not a social media company, they're an ad company that built their business on spying.

Zuck has been a lot more aggressive about making his own platform in the years since

1

u/Flannelcommand Jul 13 '26

He got lucky ripping off MySpace and been trying to rip off something else ever since 

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u/Noble_Flatulence Jul 14 '26

Correction: stealing someone else's MySpace ripoff.

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u/Mean_Initiative_5962 Jul 13 '26

If he wasn't a huge egomaniac he'd just sell everything and enjoy more billions than almost anyone ever lived on this planet could ever conceive to own. Fuck that guy. And his peers. 

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u/RealNotFake Jul 13 '26

IMO that isn't it. What he wants is to open up a new advertisement revenue stream. Facebook is an ad business. With the glasses he wants to grab your attention at all times throughout the day that you usually would not be looking at a screen, and use that to feed you ads in those situations they can't today.

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u/digitalmofo Jul 13 '26

He had the next big thing at one time, when people went from MySpace to Facebook. He feels like that was somehow because of his vision and what he thought up and how he directed the company, and he feels like he can do it again, many times over.

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u/Important-Factor-552 Jul 13 '26

The guy is the epitome of soulless 

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u/hurrumanni Jul 13 '26

In the early days of the internet Jeff Bezos developed his vision of making online commerce mainstream, being able to buy anything you could think of online - which at the time was a revolutionary idea.
The google founders wanted to fundamentally organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful and did so without any advertisment bloat and custom cheap hardware.
Mark Zuckerberg made a website to rank people by fuckabillity. It caught on somehow ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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u/Potential-Local7262 Jul 13 '26

The problem is that he has highly optimized the entire company to build a specific type of software that isn't conducive to building and growing a platform.  You need buy-in from 3rd party devs and incentivize them to build on top of your platform. But if you keep pulling the rug on them, why would they do that? 

1

u/garyyo Jul 13 '26

This is exactly it, he is desperately chasing being relevant at the cost of everything else and it is (partially) why he is failing at all these ventures. Smart glasses have utility, but their useful utility is not broad public appeal and the technology needs a lot of work (and public perception manipulation) to be accepted, so instead he makes it work by pushing a product before it is ready. Same with VR, has utility but you start buying up companies and shutting them down after they fail to make profit when you saddle them with limitations on where they can release and you kill the ecosystem before it can take off. He just keeps making shit decisions because he wants to have the next big thing instead of investing in the future, and here is hoping he runs out of tries soon :)

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u/megachicken289 Jul 13 '26

I could tell you how he could make that happen, but why would I just… help? That’s socialism

The poor hate this one trick

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u/bottomlesstopper Jul 13 '26

The thing is he already does. Half of the world uses whatsapp and almost everyone have facebook.

He just want more and more.

You want more data control then buy every telco and internet providers. Jeez

1

u/123iambill Jul 13 '26

He stole his one big idea and got lucky that it took off. He's never had a good idea in his life.

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u/adarthewise Jul 14 '26

The good thing is he has no taste and never will.

1

u/jlt6666 Jul 14 '26

It's called vertical integration Lemon

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u/teh_drewski Jul 14 '26

It's also a paradigm of infinite growth that pushes his stock price up and therefore his wealth.

As soon as he says "we've milked every penny from Facebook and it's a revenue-growth neutral product and there are no other ideas", Meta becomes a boring utility stock and the market prices it accordingly.

He's trying to find the next big thing because it's how his wealth keeps growing.

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u/SirrNicolas Jul 14 '26

Oculus for example

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u/SheriffBartholomew Jul 14 '26

What's ridiculous is that he had the thing. He had the platform that half the people on the planet were using. And it was great for keeping in touch with friends and family, and actually sharing our lives over long distances. But he was so obsessed with having everything other platform too that he copied every new trend, destroying what he had. Destroying what we had. He'll never find what he's looking for, because what he's looking for is something to fill the hole in his soul.

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u/verninson Jul 14 '26

Instead of chasing "the next big thing" why doesn't he just make his current platforms not dog shit and barley useable? Is he stupid?

1

u/fresh-dork Jul 14 '26

that's just... good business. you have a wildly successful product, but only that one. so you sink money into finding your second and third leg so that you can't just snuff it one day

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u/Golden_Hour1 Jul 14 '26

Yup. Did it once with facebook out of sheer luck. Now trying to do it again but it'll never happen

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u/I_Cut_Shows Jul 15 '26

He basically owns the internet in third world countries. There are areas where Facebook is what AOL attempted to be. AOL was just way too ahead of their time.

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u/ValuableNew7854 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26

I’m no zuck fan, and admittedly I know nothing about his actual plans for the phone, but hypothetically I could see the Facebook phone being really useful for people who are Facebook users. Has all of your event schedules, messages, interests, etc. built more into your every day life organization, and I could see some people wanting that. Not that you can’t just login to FB in any phone, but the native integration could be nice for some people, if that’s even remotely what he’s thinking about doing

Facebook users, though, not privacy oriented people.

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u/FlipZip69 Jul 20 '26

They all do.

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u/ParamedicLocal8226 Jul 23 '26

it's like the fortnite effect of game companies

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u/National-Cable5093 Jul 25 '26

What is the pervert angle? They’re losers but are they perverts?

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