Facebook and my Data
I am a bit ambivalent about on-line privacy. Most of us happily sign up to Facebook, Google, Twitter and the like without a thought as to how a free service can earn so much revenue. Like most people, I love a bargain, but then, at times I get worried about what these free services are doing with my information. So, how do these companies earn so much when they are charging users nothing? They do it by selling the on-line version of you and me. Our digital lives are their product, not the services they give us for free. Social media companies give us free services so that we willingly sign up to them with hardly a thought to their (invariably multi-page) user and privacy agreements. These agreements permit them to vacuum up every bit of our on-line searching, browsing, emailing, messaging and social history. They then use this information to profile us and sell targeted advertising, or to sell on to third parties for their various uses. Is there another way? I would like to ...