You have likely heard of the recent controversy over the breach of 50 million Facebook user’s profiles being improperly accessed and used by the political data “research” firm, Cambridge Analytica. Really, I imagine this applies to all Instagram users too, as Facebook Inc. owns both Facebook and Instagram websites.
This research firm is used by all sorts of people for various reasons - the Trump campaign paid $6M to get access to voter research information from Cambridge, but that is nothing new, as Obama also used this same firm in 2012.
The fact is that Facebook probably knows more about you then your mother does – they know where you live, your birthday, your browsing history, your friends/family, where you work, your mobile phone number, your email addresses, etc. When you sign up for Facebook, you are allowing them to have this information on you for free in exchange for getting to use their platform.
Facebook’s entire business model centers around knowing as much as they can about their users, and then exploiting that information to attract advertisers. Facebook is a website and nothing more – their users are the ones who create the content for them for free (Steemians know all about this). Facebook’s company value is $480 Billion USD, which sounds so crazy for a website, but selling your information to advertisers is big business – Facebook made $40 billion in revenue from it last year.
Here is an excerpt from Facebook’s latest 10-k, which is discussing the biggest risk factors in investing in Facebook… (this is risk #2):
We generate substantially all of our revenue from advertising. The loss of marketers, or reduction in spending by marketers, could seriously harm our business.
Substantially all of our revenue is currently generated from third parties advertising on Facebook and Instagram. For 2017, 2016, and 2015, advertising accounted for 98%, 97% and 95%, respectively, of our revenue. As is common in the industry, our marketers do not have long-term advertising commitments with us. Many of our marketers spend only a relatively small portion of their overall advertising budget with us. Marketers will not continue to do business with us, or they will reduce the budgets they are willing to commit to us, if we do not deliver ads in an effective manner, or if they do not believe that their investment in advertising with us will generate a competitive return relative to other alternatives. In addition, our advertising revenue growth has become increasingly dependent upon increased pricing of our ads. If we are unable to provide marketers with a suitable return on investment, the pricing of our ads may not increase, or may decline, in which case our revenue and financial results may be harmed.
I say all this because I think this “data breach” is a non-story – Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to have access to “some” information, not realizing exactly how much they were giving them, but people are turning it into a data breach scenario when Facebook was willingly selling them access in the first place. Facebook likely allows many others to use (and is using themselves) all your personal information in order to get money out of your pocket in some way, shape or form.
Zuckerberg’s apology (after a week of silence on the matter) is a joke, as profiting off your info is what they do – you have willingly given your personal information to Facebook/Instagram in order for them to use it for profit, so if they decide to sell it to others, you are out of luck. Their privacy policy (impossibly long to read) and their terms of service (impossibly long to read) have tons of loopholes, which allow them to do all of this.
People will either need to be OK with Facebook/Instagram using and selling their information, or they should get off the platform. Facebook’s company valuation is a whole separate rant – really FB is a short at this point with Facebook/Instagram falling out of favor, more competitors, a likely declining user base (somehow they always “grow” tho) and an increase in regulatory issues/scrutiny.
Steemit is the place to be – monetize your time and efforts!
Brian