Here is the bargain Facebook offers you:
- You get space to post whatever you want about your life on a popular, online platform. You get to specify who can see what you post. You get this space for free.
- Facebook gets control, not only of the material you post, but also of whatever other information about you it can gather by analysis of that material, and gets to sell that information to third parties. You give them all this for free.
For several reasons I no longer consider this trade-off to be in my, or your, best interest, and over the next several posts will lay out these reasons. In a comment on my initial announcement about leaving Facebook, Erika mentioned my reaction to the book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism as a driving force behind this decision, and she was partly right. Anyone who wants a thorough assessment of the social impact of “Surveillance Capitalism” ought to read that book.
On the other hand, many of the arguments in that book only clarified and lent greater support to suspicions of Facebook that had been growing on me for a few years. The first suspicion, now amply confirmed, was that Facebook’s enforcement of user data privacy has been embarassingly sloppy since the company’s founding. In most cases the public exposure of user data was not a result of Facebook being victimized by malicious hackers, but a side-effect of its own policies and employees’ activities.
Some of you are probably thinking, “But why should I care? I don’t post anything on Facebook that I need to keep private. Anybody who does that is an idiot and deserves every bad thing that happens to them as a result of exposure.” OK, I’m not being fair. I have no idea what you are thinking, but I know what I used to think and just quoted it. The trouble with this line of thinking is that it assumes you are fully conscious of everything you reveal about yourself when you post personal information on sites like Facebook, and that the only significant facts people can learn about you from the information you post is what is on the surface.
It is obviously not true that in face-to-face interactions we only expose to others what we consciously intend to reveal. People learn a lot about us from the way we interact with them, much of it we’d rather they didn’t know. We all know this is true and it profoundly affects our behavior in our everyday social gatherings. That’s why many people felt liberated by their early experiences online. It appeared to them that much of the “negative” information about them available in face-to-face interactions was no longer accessible. It is now a truism that one of the main reasons people behave much differently online from their face-to-face behavior is that they believe they can, if they choose, be completely anonymous. This was always false but it is far less true today than it was in the early days of the internet when the meme “on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog” was coined. Today, that unqualified claim is hopelessly naive. On the internet you may yet be able to hide the fact that you are a dog, but that is little comfort when savvy actors can determine whether you like biscuits better than soup bones, which leg you prefer to scratch yourself with, how often your master takes you for a walk, and whether you’ll charge the door or hide under the couch when a burglar tries breaking in.
Many major internet companies, most notably Google and Facebook, base their entire business model on learning as much about you as they can from your interactions on their platforms and then selling that information to other commercial entities. This goes far beyond the details of your personal life that you choose to post on their platforms, whether it be photos, documents, emails, videos, messages, phone calls, comments, or even simple things such as “likes” and votes in online polls. These companies also use analytic tools to determine how you react to content posted by advertisers and other users and develop a profile of your personality that can be used to more effectively sell you things or otherwise influence your decisions. You may remember the scandal over the data collected about millions of Facebook users that Cambridge Analytica used to influence voters to support Donald Trump for president. Even though publicly Facebook execs acted as if Cambridge Analytica’s use of their data was an embarassment for the company, behind the scenes they tell their customers this is a feature, not a bug. The more effectively one of Facebook’s customers achieves its objectives by the use of accurate information about how you will behave when exposed to the customer’s message, the more valuable Facebook’s data about you becomes, and the more money Facebook’s customers are willing to pay Facebook to get their hands on this data.
Notice that the more Facebook knows about you, the more money they make. Do they pay you for this information? How about Facebook’s customers? Does this greater knowledge of your behavior produce a more satisfying online experience for you? Does it improve your life more than if Facebook and their customers left you alone? Ha. Ha. Ha. Now you know my first reason for moving much of my online activity off of Facebook. If they want to sell details of my life, let them pay me for it first. Since that deal isn’t in the cards, I’ll take my life elsewhere, thank you.