This is Facebook actively circumventing their users' explicit requests to not be tracked :) They have no respect for you
Do you know that almost every "share on Facebook" button on a random news article/blog post collects data from you, if you don't have strong privacy protection enabled? That means even if you have never registered a Facebook account, Facebook could gather your page view data and use that to show ads targeting you on another page.
Same thing here.
I agree that Facebook also collects data in other ways, but this is entirely unrelated.
What a gibberish. Tell me, how will it technically do that?
On what "another page"? On the same website - yes. So what? Each website can do that.
So, if you don't like that or have moral issues or whatever hangups you want to conjure up to hate on them: don't be a customer. And don't be an investor. Its as simple as that.
For example, Facebook also abuses the privacy of people who aren’t customers (or more accurately, users). Or maybe cutting yourself off from Facebook would mean cutting yourself off from family or friends. Maybe WhatsApp is essential for your work, or for a community organisation you are part of. Or if you have a pension fund, it almost certainly invests in Meta. There are lots of conflicting priorities and issues that can come up when trying to think about the costs of being a users of a particular platform.
In reality it’s totally fine to think that a service you use is doing something wrong, to complain about them doing it, and to want them to stop. Some might choose to leave the service; others might want to spread awareness about the issue, or call for regulation. And others might shrug their shoulders and accept it anyway.
I’m not sure why you seem so convinced that the only two valid positions are “silently embrace anything they do” and “cut yourself off entirely”.
How about bots, can you use your account sometimes and other times give it to your bot essentially simulating activity and throwing gravel into machinery or will they shut you down?
Maybe if you could find a way to fill their logs with the kinds of data that actually matter (fake your precise GPS location, fake contacts/friends/relatives with detailed fake histories and fake contacts of their own, fake credit card statements showing fake purchase history, etc) it might be more worthwhile, but you'd still be taking a chance because ultimately your life is going to be changed because of what ends up in the logs being collected.
You could get turned down for a job because your fake bot was a little too interested in drug/alcohol related websites, or maybe you'll be charged more or denied healthcare coverage because your bot made it appear that you were living an unhealthy lifestyle. The fake location data you sent might get you arrested by police if you were one of only a few people logged within a 2 mile radius of a crime.
You can't break down the system by messing with the specifics in your dossier. The system will process your data (the real and the false) just fine and keep right on running. Real or fake, that data will follow you for the rest of your life and it will be all be used against you any time someone thinks it might benefit them to do so.
we can sit around for apple to subvert it (as ppl often celebrate here), except that they're doing the subverting itself subversively: they're pleasing the masses with privacy improvements (chiefly as a competitive edge - it's profitable for their model), while leaving critical options opt-in so that the result is most people stay uneducated and leave enough tracking on to reap partners and the economy huge returns over the last 15 years off ad tracking that end of the day happened on apple's platforms. these kind of solutions make us feel like the capitalists are caring for us in their competition and pacify us, particularly the ones savvy enough to be happy about these privacy options and otherwise savvy enough to have organized people against it if they hadn't felt it was solved for them.
The point is that the cost of tracking stays unchanged no matter what the data you feed it says. It's also just as meaningful in that it will still be collected, sold, used against you and will still have very real impacts on your life. The contents of your data will not and does not impact the machine or its functioning at all. All that matters is that there is data to collect and to leverage against you.
You're right we can't trust companies to save us here. The only solution to this is strong regulation with oversight and teeth. Until we get that, we can only do what little we can to limit the amount of data we give up and increase awareness of what's happening and how it harms us all.
It's expensive, it's rarely performed correctly, the actual signal still exists within the noise and can generally be determined.
I'm not saying "don't try", but really, don't bet your life (or anyone else's) on it.
No one has to accept this false dichotomy. There are far more options. Severely regulate this behavior, force them to break up into smaller companies, declare privacy a right and thus something you can't legally bargain away through accepting a Terms of Service agreement, etc, etc.
You don't suddenly decide to stop doing evil for just a few percentage points after all.
I'm not sure that's a given. It seems like mass data collection is profitable in a vast number of ways that have nothing to do with ads which could themselves be more than enough to incentivize google and facebook to continue collecting it.
It's used to set you how much you pay for things like health insurance. You just see your rates go up. You don't know it's because they saw you spent too much at bars or that people in your zip code increased their spending on fast food over the last 6 months.
Everyone wants their hands on your data to abuse in any way they can to give them an advantage over you. To take advantage of you.
It's being used to manipulate you and to shape your views. It's used to decide if you will be offered a job, or get an apartment. It's sold and resold over and over, to data brokers, but also to governments (including US companies selling that data to the US government). There's an entire multi-billion dollar a year industry around buying and selling the most mundane aspects of your life for this reason.
Every scrap of data that is taken from you can be leveraged against you or sold to someone else on the promise that it could be.
The only way to win is not to use term.
The only way to win is to bend over backwards to block all of their various tracking garbage that is hiding in the majority of internet websites.
And I suspect that even the most stalwart soldier in this fight is probably still losing somehow.
? That doesn't make sense. It is most certainly not "free" and the real price is one that is far more than the costs of providing their services. The problem is that joe user doesn't understand the value of what they are paying so Facecrook is selling trinkets to the natives for land.
As a user have no debt to them just because they offer something for free. Maybe you psychologically feel that way (reciprocity is a common psychological effect that is exploited in marketing)
This is akin to you saying you hate McDonalds hamburgers and then you grudgingly march on into McDonalds every Friday and order one. Make your own hamburgers dude.
Also, your argument is basically vicitim blaming imo
(Well, it's an arsehole-capitalist concept, but isn't that pretty much what "libertarian" means in practice nowadays?)
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[1]: User, product, whatever you want to call them.
That comes from products advertised through FB, most of which are marketed toward the roughly 1 billion wealthiest residents of the world: US, EU, Japan, and a few other rich countries.
Some complex maths suggests this works out to $117 per individual ($468 for a household of four), whether or not they use Facebook.
Facebook is not without costs, either in direct monetary support or externalised costs of the network.
Facebook tracks individuals outside of its platform, including those who do not have accounts on the platform at all.
The fact that participation has no gated cost is an intentional design of the system --- Facebooks users are the product sold to Facebook's customers, the advertisers.
People have a right to criticize and protest independent of whether they are customer, product, unwilling supporter, or collateral damage.
> Some complex maths suggests this works out to $117 billion per individual
I think you might need some slightly more complex maths
Thanks.
Point remains that FB extracts a real and significant direct monetary cost.