3 ms·

>You're paying to use their platform to connect with your "friends" by giving up your rights to whatever they can scrape off your phone. The general public (es

by _tulpa 9y ago

>You're paying to use their platform to connect with your "friends" by giving up your rights to whatever they can scrape off your phone. The general public (especially in developing countries) don't understand this at all. In many countries facebook/messenger/whatsapp is unmetered thanks to facebook subsidies, which makes 'giving up your rights' the cheapest way (sometimes the only affordable way) to pay for a service to communicate with people. Facebook is bundled with pretty much every Android phone ever. People without facebook accounts have profiles, they're just not generally visible. They've put a shitload of money and effort into forcing themselves into the position as a totally pervasive social arbitration platform, where the social cost of opting out makes it impossible even if you ignore the fact that your friends are probably still participating and happily handing over your data for you. What's bizzarre is how people who do know these things still seem to expect 'perspective and common sense' from a totally uninterested and mostly uneducated public, and how people who do know these things can ignore just how creepy and predatory Facebooks practices are.

volak 9y ago
It's not facebook's fault people are uninterested and uneducated. Every company has one responsibility and one responsibility only - to make money for investors. People who use facebook make a choice, consciously or not. They are all making a choice to sell their data in exchange for the platform. Its not a hard sell - people sell a lot more for a lot less all the time. Keep in mind this is not new. Companies like Sears, Walmart, Honeywell have customer data dating back 60 years. I've seen some of it. They never delete any of it - every credit card swipe, every zip code you've lived at, every product you've bought or returned. This is the future. If you care about the uneducated or uninterested public then join a group educating people about the value of their data and what big business does with it. Government will never be able to fix this.
- DisownedWheat 9y ago
  > It's not facebook's fault people are uninterested and uneducated. Every company has one responsibility and one responsibility only - to make money for investors. I 100% disagree with this statement. It's the equivalent of saying "A human has one responsibility and one responsibility only - stay alive" to hand-wave away criminal activity. Is BP not responsible for their oil spill in the Gulf because they still make money? Should pharmaceutical companies not have to put side effects on their product labels because the consumer should have educated themselves on how these chemicals affect your body? I get that companies have been doing this for a long time and people should know this, but it hasn't been happening on this scale before, nor with the amount of computing power we have today to do some frankly frightening things.

by _tulpa 9y ago

volak 9y ago

It's not facebook's fault people are uninterested and uneducated. Every company has one responsibility and one responsibility only - to make money for investors. People who use facebook make a choice, consciously or not. They are all making a choice to sell their data in exchange for the platform. Its not a hard sell - people sell a lot more for a lot less all the time. Keep in mind this is not new. Companies like Sears, Walmart, Honeywell have customer data dating back 60 years. I've seen some of it. They never delete any of it - every credit card swipe, every zip code you've lived at, every product you've bought or returned. This is the future. If you care about the uneducated or uninterested public then join a group educating people about the value of their data and what big business does with it. Government will never be able to fix this.

DisownedWheat 9y ago
> It's not facebook's fault people are uninterested and uneducated. Every company has one responsibility and one responsibility only - to make money for investors. I 100% disagree with this statement. It's the equivalent of saying "A human has one responsibility and one responsibility only - stay alive" to hand-wave away criminal activity. Is BP not responsible for their oil spill in the Gulf because they still make money? Should pharmaceutical companies not have to put side effects on their product labels because the consumer should have educated themselves on how these chemicals affect your body? I get that companies have been doing this for a long time and people should know this, but it hasn't been happening on this scale before, nor with the amount of computing power we have today to do some frankly frightening things.