cnn | We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to
predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote. We have been
handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and
our friends, loved ones and acquaintances. With this information,
Facebook and the "big data" research firms purchasing their data predict
still more things about us -- from our future product purchases or
sexual orientation to our likelihood for civil disobedience or even
terrorism.
The true end users of
Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are
Facebook's paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers.
The countless hours that we -- and the young, particularly -- spend on
our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock
valuation.
The efforts of a few
thousand employees at Facebook's Menlo Park campus pale in comparison to
those of the hundreds of millions of users meticulously tweaking their
pages. Corporations used to have to do research to assemble our consumer
profiles; now we do it for them.
The information
collected about you by Facebook through my Facebook page isn't even
shared with me. Thanks to my page, Facebook knows the demographics of my
readership, their e-mails, what else they like, who else they know and,
perhaps most significant, who they trust. And Facebook is taking pains
not to share any of this, going so far as to limit the ability of
third-party applications to utilize any of this data.
Given that this was the
foundation for Facebook's business plan from the start, perhaps more
recent developments in the company's ever-evolving user agreement
shouldn't have been so disheartening. Fist tap Arnach.
