On the February 11 2019 episode of Recode Decode, Elevation Partners founding partner Roger McNamee spoke with Recode’s Kara Swisher about his new book, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.
A must-listen podcast that sheds some light on the background of the growth and problems at Facebook, as well as the social problems linked to the successes of Silicon Valley internet and social media giants.
A former mentor to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who helped recruit COO Sheryl Sandberg to the company, McNamee said he reluctantly became a critic of the way big tech companies like Facebook and Google are abusing their users’ trust.
“You know, in advertising they say you are not the customer, you’re the product, but for Google and Facebook you are the fuel,” McNamee said. “And the problem is they gather all this data, not to improve your customer experience. Although they do a little of that, they really do it in order to create other products that may never even touch you, where you get no benefit at all. And importantly, they do this on the Silicon Valley model of shipping the product the minute it works without any consideration to the possibility there’ll be collateral damage.”
Recode.net