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> These companies aren't selling state of the art tech here - why do they need to be such money makers??

You’re thinking of the user facing element as being the thing they’re selling. That’s not what they’re selling. They give that away for free so they can sell extremely sophisticated data and targeting. You’re the product they’re selling. And the access is definitely cutting edge.

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Yes, I get that the industry is leveraging its "best and brightest" on stalkertech and the users are getting pennies worth of value in trade for large dollars of value extracted from them in the form of data. The tradeoff is so ridiculous that it is essentially theft. Its like trading trinkets to native populations for land.

Side note: the whole trinkets for land thing is exaggerated. Native populations didn’t have any concept of land “ownership” similar to what the Europeans did. There is a strong argument that they perceived the trinkets as more of a friendly gesture, like a diplomatic gift. Then the settlers proclaimed they owned the land and ran the native populations off. Not so dissimilar than how you’re using the analogy, because users don’t really have a good concept of owning their data or metadata, while the social media empires expropriate it for their own immense gain after confusing the users into thinking they were getting something for free, all the while giving themselves the excuse that it was a fair trade because the users/natives accepted the pittance offered to them.

trinkets to natives is a great way to clarify whats going on

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