Thursday, December 20, 2018

Facebook: Let the freeloading user beware

People still use Facebook, but one revelation after another confirms that the company shares its users' data in ways they neither realized nor expected.

Two prominent political examples of this were exposed when President Barack Obama's presidential campaign and Cambridge Analytica, a vendor that sold data to Republican campaigns, acquired access to the profiles of nonconsenting Facebook users in 2012 and 2016, respectively.

This week, we've learned that Facebook gave masses of putatively private information, including messages between Facebook friends, to companies such as Spotify, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Netflix.

People who create accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and other supposedly free services need to understand what this act entails.

Because you don't pay for Facebook, you are not Facebook's customer.

No matter how terrible Facebook's perfidy becomes, the U.S. should not set out to create a federal department of social media regulation.

Once you realize you're going to be treated like a product, it should change the way you use and share on a platform like Facebook.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/facebook-let-the-freeloading-user-beware

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