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> Facebook knows about all of your interactions on Facebook, and they probably know what you are buying and what sites you visit through tracking mechanisms. S
by austenallred 9y ago
> Facebook knows about all of your interactions on Facebook, and they probably know what you are buying and what sites you visit through tracking mechanisms.
So what? I mean that earnestly - why is it inherently bad if a company knows a lot about me?
> What utility are they really getting? It's fake utility.
Do you really believe that easily keeping up with friends is "fake" utility? You really think that billions of people log on to a website every day that provides no "real" utility?
> People somehow existed for something like 300,000 years without this utility, so what value is really there?
People existed for a long time without the the lightbulb, automobiles, the wheel, computers, etc. You're basically arguing that there can't be any utility in anything new.
- rlucas 9y ago42% of the US population smoked daily. You really think that a hundred million people lit up daily with no "real" utility?
- austenallred 9y agoFair point - people finding value in something doesn't imply that it's a net positive. That said, I'm not convinced that the value Facebook provides is net negative.
- pdkl95 9y ago> why is it inherently bad if a company knows a lot about me? With enough data about you (Facebook collects more than enough) it becomes easy to manipulate you (blackmail, "targeted advertising" aka propaganda, etc), and your pattern-of-life can be sold for profit. Data doesn't go away and we keep inventing more powerful analysis methods, so the risk, that collected data will be used against you only increases with time. Claiming that this risk doesn't exist or isn't likely to happen requires showing how Facebook won't lose control of the data to any future hacker, government, or buyer with a sufficiently large cash offer. Pretending otherwise is a just-world fallacy.
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