Facebook cashes in on our Profiles

Develop a complete profile; make sure your profile is not merely a resume but, rather, an expression of your persona. Be authentic. Remember, this is for your friends and people you want to befriend. This is the advice from every social media expert I’ve heard.

Yet, it now seems that this “rich” profile is the very substance of Facebook’s billions of dollars of ad revenue. They are mining our profiles and selling targeted advertising to companies for a very healthy profit. That’s our privacy they’re selling, without our overt consent and certainly without any share of the profit.

Usually, a commercial transaction is a two-way transaction. You buy a service or product from someone in exchange for money. The third party who makes the service or product is also compensated by a previous two-party transaction. In this case, Facebook and the marketer are in a two party relationship. But, the third party (we who are participants or members) is not involved – we are not compensated by Facebook for creating our profile for their use. Nor are we told that they will make lots of money by selling the very information of our personal lives that we place there.

How does that strike you?

Categorized in: Technology