I don’t think people really can feign ignorance. What did we think was going on? FB built this huge free product out of the goodness of their hearts? Did nobody stop to think about how Zuck became a billionaire and pays all these employees?
> Did nobody stop to think ...?
There were the mildly provocative arguments about facebook users being "the product". Like cattle. Many just assumed they were not susceptible to ads or strong enough not to be manipulated. Folks were thinking about this on an individual basis, assuming that yes, some dumbasses would get sucked in by Farmville but that they themselves were impervious.
Turns out it doesn't matter what any one individual thinks. Facebook is all about scale and knowledge. They're selling enormous social power to whoever forks over the money. It doesn't matter to facebook if the real customer is selling soap or authoritarian government.
I think only now are we getting wise to the full implications of Facebook and the like.
"Facebook was not originally created to be a company, it was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected."
I wrote a tweet series critiquing this:
The privacy concerns were pretty much hidden from the public the entire time.
Polite advertising combined with targeting is also potentially very problematic. Passive targeting (people who are interested in X do Y so I will advertise X near Y) seems fine, but it in this day and age it intersects with tracking... which brings us back around the circle.