While the company took great pains to emphasize last week that it never ended up following through with the proposal, the mere fact that the company’s founder had openly discussed quite literally charging a per-user fee to access user data really drove home how the company views its users as monetizable entities being exploited by a for-profit... See more

While most Americans likely believe that their drug prescriptions are protected from any form of exploitation under medical privacy laws like HIPAA, it turns out that those laws permit pharmacies like Walgreens to monetize their users through advertising. Specifically, pharmaceutical companies can pay Walgreens to send an advertisement for a drug... See more

The developers that turn to Facebook are there for one sole purpose: to reach Facebook’s two billion users.

Does that count as Facebook “selling” the data of two billion users? It certainly constitutes “selling access.”

Social media platforms often generate the majority of their revenue through selling hyper targeted advertising based on algorithmically mining every second of their unwilling and unwitting users’ lives. Yet those same companies go to great lengths to argue that they are not “selling” their users’ data. What does it mean for companies to “sell” our... See more