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Opinion | What next for Facebook and Google, if they don’t break into China?
Peter Guy says the American tech giants could take a leaf out of Chinese e-commerce company Pinduoduo’s book, or they could consider cracking the e-payment market
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Technology spins off its own vicious contradictions that confound the management abilities of its billionaire founders. As if the scandal involving the inappropriate use of user data by third parties is not challenging enough, Facebook has confirmed that it is tracking users’ behaviour to rate their trustworthiness.
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Only a few years ago, Chinese internet users were warned by Western critics against naively, or ignorantly, acquiescing to their home-grown tech companies’ and government’s internet surveillance. However, the revelations about Facebook and its troubling scheme are not too different from China’s plan to give its 1.4 billion citizens personal or social credit scores based on a range of behaviours.
Facebook has more than 2.2 billion users worldwide, and its operations are obscuring the line between government surveillance and corporate surveillance. Each presents a dystopic vision. It is hard to tell if any rights are absolute, when they are granted by corporate or government leaders.
Also recently, Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned that the company might have to charge for its Android software after the European Union fined it US$5 billion for forcing phone makers to pre-install its search engine and browser. Free internet apps aren’t so free after all, now that the true cost has been revealed. Then again, would anyone actually pay for a version of Facebook or Google where their personal data was left unharvested?
Watch: The best internet memes from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Congress testimony
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