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Comment by beders | Hacker News Reader

The usage of Facebook is free. You uploaded your data voluntarily.

How do people think Facebook pays for running its service?!? Of course you are the product.

That's absolutely not true.

Sometimes some of my information is gathered without my consent or even without any warning, such as when I use a website with a FB tracker, or when third parties upload some of my personal information to Facebook.

Edit: Oh, and just because it might be buried in their TOS doesn't make it right.

Folks, those evil trackers set and collect cookies.

Act accordingly.

But Facebook also tracks people who do not have accounts, and people who pay for services. No way out.

This isn't entirely true. There is a way out. Media outlets who publish things like "Facebook Showed Me My Data Is Everywhere And I Have Absolutely No Control Over It" could also remove the Facebook scripts and widgets from their sites and write articles to the effect that it's a good decision. The way out of it is to stop with trying to shock people with the fact that they're being tracked and start taking proactive measures to prevent it in the future.

There's some logical fallacy at play when people truly believe that Facebook is the sole perpetrator of this issue.

The logical fallacy is your own, nobody in the article, or the comments believes Facebook is the only party doing this.

No you misread.

> that Facebook is the sole perpetrator of this issue

Perpetrator. I'm saying we should hold the organizations publishing articles about this kind of stuff accountable as well. They use Facebook tools (like buttons, share buttons, login integration, etc) and encourage use of Facebook to interact with their articles. This is how Facebook sips up and tracks a good portion of the web. The orgs publishing these articles are also perpetrators.

> The logical fallacy is your own, nobody in the article, or the comments believes Facebook is the only party doing this.

I'm not proposing there's a narrative convincing society that Facebook is the ONLY organization tracking us, that's just silly. I'm saying there's a narrative that is similar to "tracking people is so shocking we just don't know what to do!"

Today it's Facebook, tomorrow the article will be about Google, Microsoft, or maybe Amazon. Can you believe no one's going to budge a muscle about it?

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