That’s it in a nutshell, although I’m not sure resell is the right term. Yeah, I guess it is: they bartered some services (e-mail and search) for your information.
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Some of that is useful though. I always had location tracking turned off on my Android (Pixel) phone because it seemed creepy. However, I just enabled it because the state of WA has released an early warning system for earthquakes. It needs location tracking to work.
You have to know enough about the tech to balance the trade-offs because it’s all cost/benefit trade-offs. It’s about determining which companies are doing reasonable things, and which ones are actually doing evil things. Facebook is a major force for evil in my book. Google has issues, but it’s not as heavily invested in the dark side.
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Chiselin’ Trump: “I’m calling on all true patriots to join me at the Stop the Ban rally on May 6th. Of course, I will join you in a march to Facebook headquarters where we will demand that the management board vote not to certify the results of the oversight board’s ban on me.”
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FaceBook is dead to the younger generation. end of story if your future its over you have no future. I have 10 grandkids you might say they are elitists since all are in college or graduated from top rated schools not one I repeat not one is. oni face book they Think it is a joke because it is. all the idiots are busy posting. junk all day long. lies disinformation pie in the sky junk. Birthday wishes an food they just ate or cooked. the kids are. not interested?
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My late and older sister worked in insurance back in the 50s. She once told me they had a warehouse of 3x5 cards with medical and claims info on hundreds of thousands of people. You think we lost privacy just recently? This was when “computing” was done on IBM 80-column punch cards.
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Off topic: I hate the act of physical writing, I’m bad at it and it is extremely frustrating.
This led to very poor academic performance and a dislike of school.
Years later my fiancé convinced me to give higher education another try. My first semester I took 15 units got a 4.0.
3 years later was one of ten to graduate with my dept’s excellence award.
Being able to type my assignments on PC made the difference.
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It’s worse than that. They don’t just sell your personal information, they also sell personal information about your friends and relatives that result from your interactions with them. It’s additional information about them that wouldn’t exist, except for those interactions. Quoting from that article I linked above:
The newer way, the one that propelled FB and MZ to wealth, is totally different. In this approach, the company builds a place for everybody to share life events with friends and family. Since FB owns that place, they can record what you tell your kids and spouse and friends, and use that to understand you and by extension, something about your friends.
This list is golden. It is more valuable to me than just having Google do an anonymous introduction. It means that I “own you” and can send you leaf blower ads, quiet lawn mower ads when I expand my product line, and so on. It means that I learn about you, and as has been clearly reported, I can know about your age, eating habits, travel schedule, phone and text use, the same for your kids, your neighbors, other leaf-blower antagonists, and so on.
This is marketing nirvana. It has made FB endlessly wealthy. It has nothing to do with any other web advertising company.
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The fact that the young abandoned the platform is one of its charms to me 
Or
Hey you kids get of my pixelated lawn
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I discovered you can get a small measure of revenge on these clowns by refusing to have anything to do with the companies that ‘know’ stuff about you and being what in the hospitals call in public a ‘difficult patient’.
One woman who called me up about…I can’t recall the particulars since it was in 1997, was amazed that I would not give her any reasons for cancelling my account. to…something. (How many of YOU exactly remember a 24 year old phone call?) I just told her I didn’t want it. She was determined as hell I was going to tell her why. When I finally told her something obviously ridiculous, like the space aliens were using whatever it was to track me, she did what I wanted with an expression of disgust.
I told her “she how easy that was?” She hung up on me. I was happy.
I am trying to be a decent human being and not an asshole. Why is the workd so full of people who insist otherwise?
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Have we really come so far that, when the walls start shaking and glasses fall off the shelves and smash on the floor, people need to check their iphone to see if it’s an earthquake???
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My 92 year old mother uses Facebook more than me and her grandchildren don’t use it at all (well, except for the stupid, insurrectionist one until he move to Parler).
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One of the ugly secrets of life is that most of the people in the world are simply not that interesting. This is another of the reasons I am not on Facebook, nor have I EVER watched a Reality Show,.
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I go with the San Fernando valley method
when all the car alarms go off it’s an earthquake
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What has changed is the commoditization of our personal information, not its collection. It started with the insurance companies and credit bureaux, but it was a slow process and information sharing was limited by that. Networked computers and nearly infinite mass storage has simplified the sharing.
Another thing that has changed is the ability to develop predictive models based on that data. To my shame, it’s my profession that has done that part of the work. My favorite story along that line is the Target exec who went nuts when Target started sending all manner of baby- and pregnancy-related coupons and offers to his household. Turns out his teenaged daughter was pregnant: the predictive models knew before he did.
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When I started reading your fake Trump quote, for a minute I thought it might be real. Scary world that this could be the case.
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The day they rescind the ban, and they will at some point, I’m going to throw up. When Twitter rescinds, I’m going to throw up twice.
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Figure by Election Day in 2022 Trump will be back on.
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Sigma waves from earthquakes arrive a few seconds earlier than the actual temblor.
This gives we Washingtonians enough time to duck under a desk or table, place our head between our knees and kiss our asses goodbye.
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Facebook may also be betting that with his diet he’ll be dead by then.
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I just got notified that FB has removed a photo I posted over a year ago—it made fun of Trump’s suggestion that people inject bleach to cure COVID-19—because FB said it was promoting self-harm.
I told them to have the nearest 5th-grader explain satire to them.
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