Facebook privacy! I am SHOCKED.

I am SHOCKED.

I have been following the conversations around Facebook’s (lack of) privacy rules and people inform me that Facebook is collecting data about everything that I do and they SELL this data to advertisers!! This means that it is NO COINCIDENCE that Facebook shows me advertisements for products that I bought yesterday, cheap flight tickets to cities that I just returned from, and magazines that I am already subscribed to. OMG, can you believe that??

And they are doing their best to MINE EVEN MORE DATA about me with the sole purpose of showing me ads that even better match my needs and desires!! Seriously, at some point, those ads might actually become useful. That means that, instead of clicking on a Facebook ad, on average, once per year, they might entice me to click on them TWICE per year. The HORROR!

They do all this just so that I can use their service for free, for several hours per week. I get value without paying anything, and Facebook keeps analyzing all my behaviors so that they can optimize it until I like their system so much that I don’t want to leave.

It’s insane. No company should be allowed to operate like this.

Why are governments not doing anything?!!

I am so disappointed in Mark Zuckerberg. I honestly thought that he was the world’s most generous philanthropist, paying for this platform for all of us, with his 40 billion dollars. I figured it was simply a mind-blowing coincidence that for two weeks straight, I saw Facebook ads for mattresses, which started one day after I bought two mattresses. I genuinely thought that Facebook was more like a charity organization. I was asking around how I could donate money!

I feel TRICKED.

Governments should put an end to this! I insist that Facebook snoops on me WITHOUT offering me anything of value.

Like governments do.

(c) 2013 Sarah Marshall, Creative Commons 2.0