The Cost of Facebook

In a world overwhelmed with information and products, we don’t always know what we want. But Facebook does. Facebook collects thousand of information on you per day: your Facebook messages, ‘Likes’, posts, hobbies, real-time location, your interaction with friends, and the groups that you’ve joined. These seemingly anonymous and expressions of opinion are feeding a profitable company.

I was on Facebook the other day and a hotel booking ad for Thailand showed up. “Oh ***, that’s creepy. How did Facebook know that I was planning to go to Thailand?” The reason why some of these advertisements seem “creepy” is that personalized ads seem too intimate. Constantly exploiting this intimacy will result in hostility towards the ad because it shows that our privacy isn’t as private as we think.

Most people do not want to click that advertisement even if it was from a website that you usually use. That’s because you don’t want marketing companies to take away the option of making your own decision. Buuut you still end up going to that site to book your hotel. Facebook has the power to decide what appears on your feed and what does not.

Of course you could argue that we all agree to a privacy policy and can control all the information we post by limiting how it’s shared through our privacy settings. We can technically use the website as we wish but the terms seem superficial and sometimes it can feel forced to use privacy settings.

Most websites nowadays give you an option to sign in with Facebook. Does Facebook collect information from other sites that you logged in with? Is it okay for Facebook to have connections outside of its own website and not make it clear for users? Probably not. Collecting your information and selling it in this scenario can be seen as an invasion of privacy — especially if you don’t know how Facebook utilizes this information. However knowing this information doesn’t mean much — you’ll still be uploading that photo of your cat Sir Pounce-a-lot within minutes of taking it.

At the end of the day, you know you are being watched, studied and targeted for what you buy and are no longer an anonymous consumer. Facebook is a 400 billion dollar company that makes money by selling ads and you should be aware that their services aren’t free. In return for browsing and posting, you have to occasionally click or watch ads that keep Facebook running. Facebook and other social media platforms are evolving, expanding and gradually able to individually indentify consumers.

As a consumer, you might just be losing free will because companies already know what you want before you know what you want. After all, a marketer’s wet dream is to analyze data points so that they can commoditize privacy and monopolize the market. The only difference in this scenario is that you’re willingly giving them the data.

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