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Comment by puppetmaster | Hacker News Reader

It should be already well understood that free services aren't free. To me the moral issue of the story is how Facebook isn't upfront about "the cost" of the services they provide.

You want to use facebook to get in touch with friends? We all now know that you will be targeted by ads customized with every piece of information that you reveal (and some bits that you are not even aware you are revealing...)

Assume that an extra layer of security is also costing you some privacy. Interesting dilemma...

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It is not well understood that they are a service.

To many people it is more like a place, and places are free. Sure, technically you can buy a place and own it and charge for access, and technically somebody owns almost all places you might care to go to, but mostly we think of them as free.

The fact that it costs nothing, monetarily, to access… that very thing often makes something seem like it has no cost.

I don't understand why people think these services cost nothing monetarily.

All ads are not free, all advertised products already include the cost of advertising in their price.

So everybody are paying for those "free" services whether they use them or not.

I suspect most people don’t get as far as “thinking” that in a conscious, deliberative, system-2 sense of the word — They see no price tag, so it’s free.

Also, it's one thing to willingly give up your own data in exchange for using Facebook etc for free, but often the data they collect could reasonably considered other people's - for instance uploading your contact book to "find friends" tells Facebook what names to associate with phone numbers and helps them build "shadow profiles" (or whatever the term they use is) for users who haven't given them anything.

This is particularly an issue when minors are present in the photo, videos, comments, etc... Dad/Mom/Uncle/Grandma shares a photo of a young family member, and without a doubt a new individual has been added to Facebook's records.

Will our kids resent our posts?

It's worse than that. You can't even buy privacy-respecting Facebook service if you wanted to, even at the ARPU/LTV that Facebook would be happy to get, and network effects mean that you suffer when your friends and family choose to use Facebook but you opt out.

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