Product Sold

An update from the most powerful website in the world:

A year after Facebook last changed its privacy policies, the company is proposing another round of changes to its rules. This time, the focus is on explaining how the service works in simpler, clearer language, including a new animated dashboard that attempts to answer common questions like how to delete a post or who can see the comments you make on someone else’s post.

If Facebook really wanted to get your attention it would make the new privacy policy into an interactive quiz. Anyway, however: “But.”

But as with previous moves by the company on privacy, there is an unstated business goal: to sell more advertising based on the vast quantities of personal data that the social network has on its 1.35 billion users, both from their activities on Facebook and increasingly, their wanderings on the web and inside other mobile applications.

Do you have an internet-using friend for whom this “but” would unspool as an actual “but?” Is there anyone in your life who you think would read this story, get to this paragraph, and then turn to you and say, “wait, did you know that Facebook’s business goal is to use our personal data to sell advertising? Why was this left unstated?” Your bank has motives other than helping you buy a house; your data brokers are interested in more than your constant gratification.

Or maybe this is still a fascinating piece of trivia, unknown to many people, that free internet services are intended to make money. In which case: What happens when everyone finally finds out?