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I don't work at Facebook but I don't know if there are any major companies (tech or non-tech) that are significantly better about this? Nearly all Fortune 500
by candybar 9y ago
I don't work at Facebook but I don't know if there are any major companies (tech or non-tech) that are significantly better about this? Nearly all Fortune 500 with any significant digital operations are tracking everything they can, especially all media companies. Marketers want all the data they can get to better target people and better measure ROI - so either you're using the data you gather to better sell stuff or you're gathering data to sell it to people who can use it to better sell stuff. Big technology companies seem way better about this (from the perspective of the user) - non-tech companies have much worse practices when it comes to safe-guarding data, are generally not as conscientious about privacy implications and are much more prone to using shady third-party vendors who are not accountable to users and more likely to abuse data. This, of course, includes nearly all ad-funded publishers, where all this criticism of Facebook (and Google and Amazon and so on) abounds. The journalists that are writing about this and tsk-tsk'ing at tech are literally paid by their employers maximizing yield by selling user data.
This whole big data thing along with all these related jobs (big data engineer, machine learning engineer, data scientist, etc) - what do people this was all about? Why do we have all this data now that we didn't before - it's because everyone is tracking stuff. So where should we all work if we don't want to be part of this? If you're not doing this directly, you're probably paid by someone who is.