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I would guess that a chunk of income comes from selling datasets to interested parties, especially politically affiliated ones e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
by ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
I would guess that a chunk of income comes from selling datasets to interested parties, especially politically affiliated ones e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
- ChatGTP 3y agoThat's nice and terrifying then.
- aierou 3y agoMeta only lost income and credibility from that scandal, unless you believe the data breach was conspiratorial.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoSeems likely to me. I can't recall Facebook acting in good faith at any point in time. If there's a bunch of money to be made assisting well-funded politicians, then I'd fully expect Facebook to be wanting a piece of that pie when their business model is generally to act against the users of the site by selling their data to manipulators.
- loeg 3y agoYour guess is wildly mistaken. They did not intend to sell data to CA; and the CA events happened in 2014-2015 and the program CA abused was subsequently shut down.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoTo my mind that could be explained as CA exploiting Facebook users' data and Facebook shut down that program so that it could instead explicitly sell similar datasets.
- loeg 3y agoWell, you're wildly mistaken again. The dataset is the golden goose -- they have no interest or incentive to sell it.
- cheriot 3y agoSelling data erodes Facebook's ability to make money selling ads (because then other people will be able to target users just as well). It's never been something they did intentionally.