If the product is free, the user is the product
No, the adverts are the product.
This whole notion that nothing can be free needs to get in the bin.
Linux is free. Who's selling the user data for that?
Lemmy is free, who's the product there?
Yes, Facebook/Meta is a shady fucking company and they are indeed selling your data on top of the ads they sell, but don't lump everything free into the same bucket.
Neither Linux nor Lemmy are a multi-billion dollar company.
If the advertisements were the product, then the exchange would be give ad, receive money. The advertisers are both giving the ad and the money to Meta. The thing the advertisers receive for giving the money are the potential customers. Meta is exchanging money for users. You are the product.
Meta’s entire model is categorizing the users so effectively and giving the advertisers the tools to target the users who are most likely to spend money once they see the ad. The advertisers pay Meta for access to users as well as the data about all of the different ways that groups of users are categorized. Then the advertiser can make a new ad or new product that will appeal to either a wider audience, an audience that is willing to pay a far larger amount of money than something costs to produce, or both.
The users and their data are the product of nearly every profitable business that provides something free to users. It’s up to you to decide how you feel about that. Maybe you see an ad for something and think “That’s exactly what I’ve been looking for!” and happily pay for it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Well said
Rails against social media.
Proceeds to put a bunch of fucking hashtags.
Criticizes society.
Is a member of society.
I mean, there is still kind of a point being made with respect to monetization of social media... something which is insanely controversial on Mastodon.
Bring up something more minor like showing ads to cover server costs and it's like tossing a grenade in and shutting the door.
Same as TV has done for 70 years and radio for a 100.
You get entertainment, the company sells your attention. If you don't like it you don't use it.
Exactly the same model as reddit as well, with the addition of useless internet points in exchange of content to fuel the entertainment.
Yep, even if the amount of data harvested wasn't on the same level as TV, advertising still brings in money.
This isn't exactly corollary.
FB isn't just selling ad space, they're literally selling user data, often to adversarial countries.
Radio could never do that, and tv only could if you had a paid service like cable or satellite.
I used to have a Facebook account... I'm not even sure how many ago it was that I left it behind:-P.
Technically, everyone has a Facebook account, or at least a shadow account at Meta. Since they are one of the biggest data gatherers in the world, they gather data from all sorts of sources about people, not just from your active usage of their apps, sites and services. It's extremely likely that they have quite a bit of data on everyone. Many proprietary mobile apps, for example, initiate connections and transfer some data to Meta or Google. Even apps that have nothing at all to do with them otherwise. Many websites do. Many applications and games do. Integrated proprietary software in various devices, e.g. smart TVs, does. Also, WhatsApp is used by I think ~30% of the world's population now(?) and they started syncing/sharing all that data (mostly metadata but metadata is also very revealing) with Meta several years ago. Since WhatsApp also shares your whole contact / address book with Meta, they also effectively have a (mostly) full social connections graph on about a third of the world's population, based on WhatsApp usage data alone... so overall they'll have even more.
Unless you're efficiently blocking or otherwise interrupting all of those connections, on every device, or are able to really effectively use different IPs and never reveal all of the IP addresses associated with yourself, it's likely they still have quite a bit about you. If you're logged into a personally identifiable Google or Meta account on your phone, for example, and your phone is in your WiFi, then it'll have the same public-facing IP address as your computers, meaning they'll be able to enumerate all of your devices based on what they gathered on that IP address alone. It means that IP address can now always be linked to your person for Google/Meta/and so on.
And then there's always the possibility of the apps or websites not making your device directly connect to Meta/Google/... so it looks like only the 1st party gets your data (which always seems OK), but afterwards or in the backend it can still transmit or share the gathered data without your knowledge to those companies. This can also happen without the 1st party noticing it, because Meta and Google are often integrated in a lot of things, for example in SDKs or popular libraries. For example if you develop a mobile app using Meta's SDK, then by default (opt-out) the resulting app will transmit various kinds of telemetry data to Meta. Unless the developer disables this consciously, which many do not know or care about, it will simply be on and active. Sometimes they also have special data sharing deals with certain companies. Google has even more ways of being included in all sorts of things, they are almost omnipresent. For example Google is doing checks whether your Android-based mobile phone is carrier-locked or not, on behalf of your carrier, not your carrier. Google also receives your (personally-identifiable) IMEI and telephone number alongside every single location request your phone is doing, even from an app that's completely unrelated to Google. [unless your Android has configured a non-standard SUPL server, which isn't even an option in most Androids, or you use GrapheneOS which uses a proxy SUPL server to strip that bit of personally identifiable data before redirecting it to the real SUPL server (which most likely is your provider's, which in turn is most likely just a redirect to Google's SUPL server in the end)]. These are just examples off the top of my head, there's even more weird stuff happening of course.
So it doesn't really matter if you have active accounts at those companies, or not. They still know a lot about you and your devices, and sell that data to governments and whoever else bids the most for it. And even if they don't know you yet (if no link to your person is currently possible for a particular data set), which is highly unlikely but may be a possibility if you're truly careful and use different IPs all the time, they still gather all these records, and it only takes one single mistake on your end and they'll be able to link all records they gathered from that particular IP address to your person as well. Not only that, but they could even statistically calculate that based on what you visited or what you wrote somewhere online, or even how your typing style is, that you're likely this particular person, even if the data is still "anonymous".
It's really hard and really inconvenient to escape all the data gathering, in practice the only thing you can do is minimize it. Most users don't care at all or don't want to deal with the extra effort and simply let everything flow out. It's a much easier online life, but it's also an almost fully surveilled online life.
Every breath you take, every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take, I'll be watching you...
Can't you see, you belong to me? My poor heart aches with every step you take!
So it's not even "our" data at all, see...? (/s, or rather in the Machiavellian sense, that so long as people with power are willing to
eat"own" us, then they have that right - same as Russia owns Ukraine and Israel owns Gaza, etc.)
I gave it up in 2016. It was early in the year, and 100% because I thought it was useless. Little did I know it was the best move of the year considering how much I heard about all the crazy people coming out during election season... It still exists, I really should find time to completely remove it now.
Isn't the profit a few dozen dollars per user per year?
You are right. Rounding numbers for ease.
$134B income in 2023. 3 billion active users per month
134 ÷ 12 ÷ 3 roughly comes out to $3.7/user/month
Seems like this kinda post keeps on being published like we’re all suddenly understanding how the world works
Llama enabled open source Llm. And I actually like my Quest VR with Sidequest.
It's like; there are some raisins in the Shitcake.
Meta makes more products than Facebook. What other than a communication platform does this person want in return for paying nothing?
