back to article Facebook's Googly IPO delivers on Sun man's vision

History may record Scott McNealy as a straight-dealing leader of a major Silicon Valley tech company. In 2006, the grinning chief executive and co-founder of Sun Microsystems stunned journalists attending one of his company’s events by calling online consumer privacy a red herring. ”You have zero privacy anyway,” he said …

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  1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Big Brother

    "Our business is subject to complex and evolving US and foreign laws and regulations regarding privacy, data protection, and other matters."

    ...not to mention evolving US and foreign laws and regulations regarding secrecy, pervasive surveillance, terrorist hunting and other matters.

    1. bill 36

      agreed

      but you missed Copyright, Getty Images springs to mind.

  2. bill 36
    Devil

    Mcnealy

    Was also famously quoted as saying, "remember your first shot of heroin is free" referring to Microsoft.

    How right he was because the modern analogy is Facebook and Google.

  3. This post has been deleted by its author

  4. carrera4life
    Happy

    Yawn...

    Never heard of it..

  5. Colin Millar

    Not just data volume

    They also have to be a bit worried about the actual value of the datasets.

    How many different users, how many changes to preferences etc, the effectiveness of identifying more sepecific preferences in targetting - eventually all these things will be profiled by the advertisers.

    I can't see the value holding - it gets more expensive to be more specifically targetted and the information is less reliable. There will come a point at which the drill down is no longer worth it and then it all just goes back to trending - although in much smaller groups. There may be value in assessing individuals strength of affiliation to trend groups but once the mass data input is over FB could be in real danger of being of very little value to advertisers.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It was earlier

    The comment was actually made in 1999. I also heard him say around 2000 that 'the company that has the largest quantity of identities and credit card numbers in their directory will win' - Looks like Apple + Amazon have proved him right on this one too for now...

  7. J-Wick
    Paris Hilton

    More importantly, are you gonna continue to use that psuedo-emo bird's picture(s) to illustrate every story on the IPO?

    I'm not complaining, just asking...

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Time to get busy..

    .. with that nice article I had in mind. Privacy might become somewhat of a painful topic over the next few weeks..

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