Author: NICK WINGFIELD / Source: New York Times
The recent tribulations of Facebook, which has lurched from crisis to crisis over the past year, most recently over the handling of user’s personal data, has pushed a few of the industry’s most prominent names to speak out against the company.
Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.com, has compared the deleterious effects of social media to those of tobacco and alcohol, and has called for more regulation of those tech companies. Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has also suggested new regulation protecting personal data might be in order for businesses like Facebook.
“I think that this certain situation is so dire and has become so large that probably some well-crafted regulation is necessary,” Mr. Cook said recently at an event in China, referring to Facebook’s recent problems.
But don’t expect a long lineup of other industry leaders to speak out anytime soon.
Although technology companies have their differences, a spirit of comity prevails among its leaders in moments of crisis. For example, technology chiefs have mostly kept quiet about Uber’s travails — from its efforts to sidestep law enforcement to a pedestrian death caused by one of its self-driving cars — even if they might express their opinions privately.
Representatives from companies as varied as Amazon, Microsoft and Slack declined to comment for this story. Part of the silence, people in the industry say, comes from a desire to avoid the business equivalent of bad karma — knowing that they, too, may one day face the buzz saw of public censure.
Others say companies have little moral standing to criticize Facebook’s practices, when they have themselves relied on the social network to acquire customers, using the same ad-targeting tools that rely on personal data that have stirred up so much controversy in the context of politics.
“I think we just have to acknowledge the entire industry’s complicity with what’s happening with Facebook,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an internet real estate firm. “It’s…
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