A very good summary and it opened my eyes to a lot of aspects I wasn't really thinking about before. It didn't convince me some of the tradeoffs were worth it,

A very good summary and it opened my eyes to a lot of aspects I wasn't really thinking about before. It didn't convince me some of the tradeoffs were worth it, but it did a good job of adding nuance to my own gut feelings about privacy vs advertising ;) But one small nitpick: this bit about Facebook not knowing much about individuals individually: > the nature of computers and the Internet is the spewing of data everywhere, and it is only in aggregate, in a data factory, than any insight from this collection of vectors can be derived, and only then in the context of a larger application like targeted advertising conducted at massive scale. It is exceedingly unlikely that Facebook could even make the data about any one individual readable by a human, This is patently untrue, as anyone who does the 'download everything Facebook knows about me' thingy can confirm. (Likewise for the other big collectors. I downloaded my data from Google for kicks and even though I'd kinda expected it to surprise me, it still surprised me.)