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Comment by blitzar | Hacker News Reader

Pay or have your information harvested and sold. Its extortion.

You’re missing a third option there, which makes it not extortion.

If the third way is "don't use the product" facebook have that covered too... they will harvest and sell your personal information.

I may be misreading it, but I believe the third option the EU is expects from Meta is non-targeted advertising.

Nobody was holding a gun up to my head forcing me to open Facebook or give them money

You must be either broke and/or paranoid. If it matters to you, pay up. If it doesn't, you get to use a service for free.

Who does Facebook sell data to?

"Harvested and processed to add cohort tags to include in advertisement real-time bidding contests so advertisers can know how much to bid", while more precise, isn't as punchy as "harvested and sold".

So it's not literally sold?

I've been confused about this for a while. Given data is what allows them a unique advantage for their advertising product, it seemed odd that Facebook would sell that data to others.

But to hear people talk, a company could literally buy personal information from Facebook.

Yeah, that makes sense. Facebook wants the data so they can provide more accurate advertising "cohorts". The accuracy is the value that other people see, hence "selling" the data even though they're really selling an ad view.

So not sold. Also not your data. It is Facebook's data. It belongs to Facebook. You don't own it just because it happens to be about you.

Does someone own the Wikipedia page about them?! No, Wikipedia does.

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