A very, very helpful article to help get people we fight with to understand why this is important for anyone and everyone. Send this to friends and family.
A very, very helpful article to help get people we fight with to understand why this is important for anyone and everyone. Send this to friends and family.
Please someone explain to me for the thousandth time how our personal data equals money because I still don’t understand. My bank account has no money going to Google, meta, X…
I truly want to understand where they’re getting all this money.
They are paid by advertisers that want to sell you things and ideas. Google and Meta’s job is to keep you on their platform as long as possible so you can be served more advertisements. And to keep you dependent on their free platform to gather more data about what you like and your behavior patterns to easily influence and predict what advertisements grab your interest.
And because they have the data on you to know exactly who you are and what you may like, it’s valuable for advertisers because they know their cat litter advertisement is going to be shown to someone who very obviously has a cat through all their activities and interactions on the platform.
To be honest, since I have adblock I find it hard to understand too. How can that make so much money? But all the current richest companies and people built their empire on private data right? Google, Facebook, elon musk and so on, so it’s very easy to see the proof. You give them your data, you give them money.
Now, power is easier to understand. If you want to control or kill people, the more information you have the better. It’s easy to see why evil governments have always loved spying.
Evidently they are still pulling enough users and click through rates to warrant their reputation in advertising. Whether or not some numbers are propped up by bots, who’s to know.
Imagine billions of people depending on their platforms, and most of them will be accessing it through their official mobile apps which generally will be harder to block ads on, and most people will not seek out those methods. It’s the reason they push their official app so much. For some it is a lower priority for them, and some may even enjoy targeted advertising.
There are platforms like YouTube where you can pay to opt out of seeing ads, which is also another revenue stream.
I just have no idea what the life of a Facebook user, for instance, is like. What apps do they use, do they wear Facebook glasses? Facebook buttplugs? Can they use adblock?
It’s a wild, unknown world, and I hope to keep it that way. What everyone knows is that they are filthy rich and they got there with private data. And that’s all everyone needs to know to decide if they want to make them richer and their data is the tool for that.
But the specifics elude me.
Nope haha, just their Facebook app on their mobile phones is needed to grab all the data. And once logged in, Facebook will actually track the user’s phone usage and their Internet usage as data without the user knowing. To add to their pile to analyze the user.
This also includes Instagram and Whatsapp. Meta’s other products.
Not participating in any of their products so your data is not their raw resource is good, keep it that way.