It seems to me that it is not only Saverin who is not mindful of and not caring about the health of the nation and the people around him. Judging from the articles linked below, it seems that the entire of Facebook is not healthy:
Facebook's reputation in the mainstream media is rapidly getting worse. Facebook is getting a bad reputation partly because of articles like these:
Worst company: Facebook was a semi-finalist in the April 2012
competition to be voted the
worst company in the United States .
Facebook follows its business rules? Not always. The April 7, 2012 Wall Street Journal story,
Selling You on Facebook, says:
"Facebook requires apps [mobile phone software applications] to ask
permission before accessing a user's personal details. However, a user's
friends aren't notified if information about them is used by a friend's
app. An examination of the apps' activities also suggests that Facebook
occasionally isn't enforcing its own rules on data privacy."
There's more like that in the article.
Facebook tracks every web page you visit that has a Facebook button (using Javascript). For example, if you visit the
Oregonian Newspaper web site, Facebook tracks every story you visit, even if you don't click on the "Like" button. There are ways to prevent that (using
Firefox with the
NoScript add-on), but most people don't know about them.
Companies pay people to click on Facebook "Like" buttons. The number of Facebook "Likes" doesn't give any indication of popularity.
On December 9, 2011 it was necessary to click on a Facebook "Like" button to be allowed to see Fry's Electronics ads.
Do 86,688 people (on April 9, 2012) really like
Firestone Complete Auto Care, or did the company offer something to be "liked"?
A few problems with Facebook: Richard Stallman wrote a
short list of things wrong with Facebook.
How much information does Facebook keep? Read the December 13, 2011 article,
Twenty Something Asks Facebook For His File And Gets It - All 1,200 Pages.
What do people in other countries think? The May 14, 2010 article,
Facebook is not your friend gives one idea.
The June 15, 2011 article,
The End of Facebook, and the June 14, 2011 article,
Is this the beginning of the end for Facebook? give others.
Most people don't understand the problems that may occur. For example, consider the March 28, 2012 article,
Teacher's aide says 'no access' to her Facebook; now legal battle with school.
This April 4, 2012 article would be funny if it weren't so sad:
Woman arrested for assault based on Facebook photo. Quotes:
"Aston
... was charged
... based solely on a Facebook photo and a
generic description offered to police by the victim's boyfriend."
Defending herself required a "... court appearance and several thousand dollars in legal bills."
Open source will eventually prevail. Eventually open-source
social networks will replace advertising-driven closed-source social
networks, in my opinion. We've seen a rapid rise and fall of
advertising-driven social networks; they are fads driven by people with
no technical understanding.
Open source social network software would provide huge advantages:
1) Social networks could have whatever privacy they need. Ad-supported
networks have privacy limited by the advertiser's desires to make
money.
2) Each social network could have only the features they want.
3) The cost of having your own social network would be trivial. Each
social network group could support perhaps 30 people for $1 per month.
That's not $1 per person, that's 3.3 cents per person, per month,
because an open source social network would not use many resources.
Ad-supported social networks must support the delivery of ads.
4) All the information on an open source social network could be available to anyone who was part of that network.
5) Open source software could provide methods of joining one private
group to another in a way limited by the desires of the group.
Closed-source, advertising-supported social networks are bad for society in general:
1) Ad-supported social networks sell the visitor's personal
information for as much money as they can get. That causes numerous
problems, some of which were discussed in the links above.
2) An ad-supported, closed source social network may choose to test
the limits of the laws in each country. It's difficult and expensive for
each country to defend itself. When laws are broken in the U.S., often
the CEO gives a lame excuse, and a penalty may be trivial compared to
the amount of money made. The challenges are apparently far greater for
smaller countries.
3) The ads on ad-supported social networks are distracting. To some
they are offensive; the implication is that the reader is always looking
to buy things, and would be influenced by an ad, rather than by
research into the best product to buy.
4) Ad-supported networks have the features advertisers want, not necessarily what the customers want.