Facebook is NOT Your Friend
by Miki Saxon
Unless you’ve been living on another planet or alternative reality you’ve heard that Facebook is going public.
Facebook loves to position itself as users’ friend, with only their best interests at heart.
In his founder’s letter Mark Zuckerberg said “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”
Huh?
There is far more truth in the editorial comment, “This also seems disingenuous considering that Facebook’s biggest triumph is to help advertisers by mining user data to target ads and to train them to treat corporate brands like friends.”
The exception is the 845 million people who log in on Facebook’s mobile app, “We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven.”
But I’m sure they’ll find a way.
How much personal data does Facebook collect?
Consider the disk sent to Max Schrems, a 24-year-old law school student, a Facebook user since 2008, who is spearheading a protest against “Facebook’s illegal practices of collecting and marketing users’ personal data, often without consent.”
The disk contained 1,222 pages of information.
That’s a very rich vein of ore for any marketer to mine.
Privacy is a far bigger deal in Europe.
Europeans demand more privacy than Americans and the EU is far more willing to enforce that desire than the financially beholden US Congress.
That makes international monetization more difficult.
The drive for monetization underlies everything Facebook does—but that’s not what’s bad.
What’s bad is their pretense that it isn’t true.
Facebook as a social force isn’t going away, but you would be wise to remember that Facebook is not your friend.
Flickr image credit: marcopako 
