★★★★★ 4
Valuable and Engaging Book but with Poor Timing - It's Our Fault, too.
Format: Kindle
If this is not enough reason for companies and individuals, with even a sliver of good judgement, to stop using all Meta products ASAP, I am not sure what is. Careless People is consistent with, builds upon and confirms what both the "Real Facebook Whistleblower," Frances Haugen (The Power of One) and Jeff Horwitz (Broken Code) have already brought us. While Wynn-Williams did not have the mountains of solid evidence that I believe made the work of Haugen and Horwitz more important, Careless People does provide an interesting perspective and more detail, not only on Meta's failures caused by the drive for more profit, but also the profound personality flaws of Meta's top people.
Assuming Careless People is reasonably accurate, Sarah Wynn-Williams is a very brave, resilient woman who wanted to do the right thing for Meta. She sacrificed way too much to help Meta when they did not deserve it. She offers a descriptive account of the difficulties she encountered in her role, including cases of bizarre sexual harassment and being sent to dangerous places all over the world. Even if these are exaggerated, the creativity she had in handling such situations makes the book so interesting to read. So many things went wrong for Wynn-Williams that would have caused many of us to give up, but she kept fighting (like Haugen).
While any book providing the reasons why we all need to stop using Meta products is good progress, I am disappointed that Wynn-Williams never mentions Haugen or Horwitz in the acknowledgments or gives them credit for paving the way. I would have expected this at a minimum, since those books have been out since 2021 and those authors have provided abundant proof of Meta's world-wide and excessive damage - 22,000 pages of such proof (see the "2021 facebook leak" on Wikipedia) . As of March 2025, Wynn-Williams had never reached out to either of those two, nor offered to collaborate with them. Jeff Horwitz has interviewed hundreds of former Meta employees. Wynn-Williams left facebook in 2017. So while she offers more detail about what was wrong at Meta, she seems too late. And without any credit to the others, especially Frances Haugen, who risked just as much, if not more than Wynn-Williams, it seems strange that Wynn-Williams would now finally come forward, suspiciously looking like an attempt to use their success towards her own. That part still needs to be answered.
The obvious lesson is that the 3 billion users of Meta products are "Careless," too. Nothing changes a company's behavior faster than when people stop using its products. For more than 6 years, since Roger McNamee published "Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe" in 2019, we have known that Meta products suck the data out of users to sell it to anyone willing to pay for it. If you use any Meta products yourself and/or never bother to check that any website you are using, is sending your data to Meta with everything you click on (many tools are available to help you with this), but yet you claim to be an opponent of Trump, you have no one to blame but yourself. Meta gets away with the disastrous and horrific fallout of their carelessness BECAUSE WE LET THEM!
In fact, given what Wynn-Williams has brought us, along with the others before her, can't we simply conclude that it is POOR JUDGEMENT for any person or company to actually use Meta, Inc. products in 2025?
Meta is similar to the tobacco companies in the 70s who were not doing anything illegal (arguably still TBD for Meta). We all knew their products were dangerous, but so many continued to use them. Hopefully it will not take decades for people to change in this case. So unless there is some miraculously speedy and unprecedented exodus from Meta's user base, look for someone worse than Trump in the 2028 general election and 535 more of them in Congress now that the word is out that all you need are friends at Meta to get elected. Hang on because it's going to get much worse.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2025
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