I don’t know who this “we” is... who doesn’t get this and hasn’t understood this from the VERY START?!?! Nothing is free. Servers, data enter space, and people to manage it are hellla expensive. The last few weeks of “exposés” on Facebook are like shouting at the concrete because it’ll scrape your knee when you fall.we’ve paid far too little attention to the scale and scope of the data that Facebook has collected on us over our years of platform use
As a business owner, Facebook had more data on your business than you do. The Facebook apps were sending everything from phone locations, GPS coordinates, picture meta-data etc. That makes me think, I wonder if you can get a good enough attorney and demand that Facebook turn over all the data it has on your business?
That's not entirely accurate. Facebook has more data useful to them on any given business than the business owner. They have a set of categories that you may or may not fit into. They have a geolocation probably. They have a list of check-ins. They have any user-submitted photos (which become check-ins). However, the actual amount of useful data catalogued by Facebook is paltry; their basic approach is "pssst - you checked in at this place, tell us everything you know about it!" which gives them an "ask random strangers in the crowd"-level intelligence. More than that, the business owner has to tell Facebook. The categories they auto-propagate when you purchase advertising is pathetic. Facebook is not an intelligent agent. It's a big messy blob of uncollated, uncorrelated factoids.
A lot of regular folks! For techies (i.e. most people here), the economics and the possibilities have been known for years. That doesn’t mean my mom knew that too. Normal people were introduced to the Internet as a magical place to connect with friends & family and look up anything. The jump from that to “Facebook now has all your texts and serves you propaganda” is huge and is not unimportant. The “well DUH” attitude that I have heard a lot this last week doesn’t really help much, I think.
Nerds like myself have been raising these style concerns for a decade now and were laughed at. Part of the Snowden leaks validated the blatant assault on the concept of privacy that is all social media. Only now, when it will take a nuke to stop this monster, are the normies waking up.