12-04-2018, 02:33 AM
I agree entirely with this article. I have never had a Facebook account (not a social media user at all) but I understand that they likely have a profile built for me because many of my friends and family have accounts and have me listed in their contacts on their "smart" phones (I don't have one of those either) and have also purchased information from data brokers that likely contains my information. That's just reprehensible and puts the lie to the rejoinder that if you don't like what Facebook does then just don't use it. Well I've never used it (I even refused to be included in my company's Facebook Workplace system) and they may still have, and are probably abusing my data - and all without informing me.
Facebook is constrained by their business model which is selling "targeted" advertising. All of the high-minded BS about "community building" and "social connections" is just the cover story. Without the raw material of information they can't survive. Furthermore, they enable the abuse of this data by third parties accessing the data they have collected via their platform API and also enable surreptitious data collection by third parties through "games", "quizzes" and "polls" that have little value to their consumers but are designed to trawl through all sorts of personal information on the consumer's device without adequate, informed consent (yeah, buried in the settings there may be descriptions and possibly controls for this stuff but they're obviously designed to not be found or to be difficult to use effectively - FB itself has a history of doing this).
They are clearly a monopoly and have gone to great lengths to buy up existing competitors and crowd out potential competitors through their market power. The will never self-regulate and have shown that they will continue their current practices despite the current outcries and disingenuous mea culpas by Zuckerberg.
Personally I would like to see the entire social media thing just disappear but I will settle for FB being broken up and the European standards for personal privacy and data ownership being imposed not only on FB but all of the competitors spawned by its break up as well as any other Internet and non-Internet businesses that engage in the same type of data collection practices.
Facebook is constrained by their business model which is selling "targeted" advertising. All of the high-minded BS about "community building" and "social connections" is just the cover story. Without the raw material of information they can't survive. Furthermore, they enable the abuse of this data by third parties accessing the data they have collected via their platform API and also enable surreptitious data collection by third parties through "games", "quizzes" and "polls" that have little value to their consumers but are designed to trawl through all sorts of personal information on the consumer's device without adequate, informed consent (yeah, buried in the settings there may be descriptions and possibly controls for this stuff but they're obviously designed to not be found or to be difficult to use effectively - FB itself has a history of doing this).
They are clearly a monopoly and have gone to great lengths to buy up existing competitors and crowd out potential competitors through their market power. The will never self-regulate and have shown that they will continue their current practices despite the current outcries and disingenuous mea culpas by Zuckerberg.
Personally I would like to see the entire social media thing just disappear but I will settle for FB being broken up and the European standards for personal privacy and data ownership being imposed not only on FB but all of the competitors spawned by its break up as well as any other Internet and non-Internet businesses that engage in the same type of data collection practices.