What Does It Mean For Social Media Platforms To "Sell" Our Data?
What’s more, nothing on social media belongs to us. Our art, our ideas and our relationships are reduced to data to be mined and exploited by tech corporations, sometimes even used to train A.I. models. We have no backups, either: Few people still keep address books or mailing lists, much less diaries or photo albums. When we lose access to social... See more
Opinion | I Gave Up My Smartphone for a Dumbphone. You Can, Too.
Lastly, what data you can claim to be yours is usually not worth the trouble to engineer a whole payment scheme around. If you opt out of hyper-targeting on Facebook (the ‘Custom Audiences’ toggle you can maybe find a dozen levels deep in your Facebook settings screen), your ARPU, i.e. the revenue Facebook makes off of you, doesn’t go to zero. That... See more
Antonio Garcia Martinez • Advertising and Web3
On his regular rants about ‘the Facebook,’ an old business professor I had in Navarra used to say, in his velvet Spanish accent, “If there’s no price, you are the price.”
Tommy Dixon • How to end your extremely online era
Every time you send a message or status update on Facebook, or Snapchat, or Twitter, and every time you search for something on Google, everything you say is being scanned and sorted and stored. These companies are building up a profile of you, to sell to advertisers who want to target you.
Johann Hari • Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again
The internet, we could say, is still running in a fairly agrarian economy, as that most precious digital commodity—data—is consigned to the localities of individual platforms: Spotify, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and, yes, Facebook. The metaverse, Zuckerberg suggests, is a railroad between these local economies that lets them exchange data with the... See more