Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

It's worth noting that FB was quite possibly being secretly funded with taxpayer money by national intelligence interests at inception, which would have substantially reduced or eliminated commercial pressure early on.

DARPA was working on Project LifeLog starting in 2003, was to be "an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person's experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities". The objective of the LifeLog concept was "to be able to trace the 'threads' of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships", and it has the ability to "take in all of a subject's experience, from phone numbers dialed and e-mail messages viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone".

The program, at least officially and publicly, was cancelled on February 4th, 2004, the exact same day that Facebook was founded.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

You can call it a coincidence if you want, I just tend to be very skeptical of "coincidences" where massive, powerful, unaccountable, immoral, unethical institutions like the US intelligence community get exactly what they want at the expense of our civil liberties.






I often wonder if national intelligence interests are behind or have taken control of major corporate players like Microsoft, Google and Apple. There was an article [0] back in 2015 that brought forth the proposition that google was created by the CIA. It would explain the current enshitification of these companies and the lengths they are going to take away choice.

[0]: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...


Ever wonder why Microsoft bought Skype?




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: