Facebook's Zuckerberg: Man of the year or bozo of the year?
Although Mark "Boy Billionaire" Zuckerberg has played fast and loose with the privacy rights of much of the world, it appears that he and his company Facebook are pretty darn popular with the folks who work there. Indeed, Facebook was at the very top of the heap -- in both tech and nontech -- as rated by Glassdoor's contributors. Facebook earned a 4.6 rating out of 5 points. SAS Institute, NetApp, Apple, and Google followed. (When looking at rankings beyond the tech sector, the top four companies following Facebook were Southwest Airlines, Bain & Co., General Mills, and Edelman.)
Zuckerberg's CEO rating was 96 percent, tied for second place with Google's Eric Schmidt and James Truchard of National Instruments. Only Steve Jobs of Apple fared better, earning a near-perfect rating of 97 percent.
Zuckerberg has also just been named Person of the Year by Time magazine, a title given to an individual who has "for better or for worse ... done the most to influence the events of the year." Time's editors say the title isn't necessarily an honor -- Adolf Hitler was once Man of the Year -- but I suspect the Boy Billionaire isn't feeling much pain today. The introductory essay about him managed to mention "privacy" just twice in 725 words. Time's fawning coverage even included a collection of family snapshots, starting with Baby Zuckerberg looking adorable as he crawled around the floor of the family home in Dobb's Ferry, N.Y.
Sorry, but for the sake of Zuckerberg's profits, Facebook has sold out users not just once, but over and over again, blithely exposing users' private information to any advertiser or creep who happens to get interested. It's a tired drama. The company messes up, it gets caught, the media freaks out, the company apologizes. Then the cycle starts all over, as it did earlier this year when the Wall Street Journal learned that it's not just Facebook harvesting personal data -- Facebook's platform developers are in on it as well. That data is being shared with advertisers and Internet tracking companies, whether or not users have opted for privacy.
Person of the Year? Bozo of the Year is more like it.
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This article, "Silicon Valley's worst of the worst," was originally published by InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bill Snyder's Tech's Bottom Line blog and follow the latest technology business developments at InfoWorld.com.