Your Privacy

The public consternation over Cambridge Analytica’s  “misuse” of Facebook users’ data has received a lot of press lately, culminating in an appearance by Mark Zuckerberg in front of Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees. What went on in committee was pretty much a game of softball contrived to mollify public concern. Literally, nothing to see there.

The awkwardness for Zukerberg is the fact that the Facebook lives and dies on the harvesting of user information. The greater the volume of information and the more precise the data is, the more valuable it is for selling, or for pushing targeted advertising at Facebook users. In short, totally respecting user privacy would destroy the business! The entire platform is predicated on users willingly sharing personal information which can be used as a revenue generator for Facebook. While most may believe that Facebook exists to share cute puppy pictures or details of a vacation, a peak behind the curtain reveals a massive machine that harvests and packages user data for sale.

In fairness to Facebook, they are not alone in the mass harvesting of user data for profit. Google has long been involved in profiling your internet activity (harvesting your data) to enhance the effectiveness of their pay per click advertising programs. This has infiltrated their search engine results.  Most users of Google search are unaware that results are tailored not only on your search query, but to the profile that Google has of you, as well. Your results are tailored to show you what Google “believes” you want to see.  This means that an identical query from two different Google users can produce a different list of results!

At the very least, online services including Facebook should state clearly that they are collecting your personal data, because that is how they generate revenue.