"Zuckerberg needs your data..."

“Zuckerberg needs your data. His business is built upon it. The most important thing to understand about Facebook is that you are not Facebook’s customer, you are its inventory. You are the product Facebook is selling. Facebook’s real customers are advertisers. You, as a Facebook member, are useful only because you can be packaged up and sold to advertisers. The more information Facebook can get from you, the more you are worth. In response, a FB spokesman told me: “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

Lyons, on Facebook (via newsweek)

But isn’t this the same with any ad-supported service? MySpace? GMail? Etc?  Hell, even advertising on the old TV is built this way. It’s our behavior that is the product.

All that said, I wonder if most people understand this dynamic.  No one is getting “free hosting services” for their pics and status updates—they are getting hosting services in exchange for their pics and status updates.  Maybe not the literal content, but the behavior patterns behind the content is sold to advertisers.  How else are these sites supposed to remain “free”?

Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing

Link: Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing

newsweek:

soupsoup:

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he said. “That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.”

Call it Zuckerberg’s Law.

We think sharing is great! Except maybe not so much when you’re being pushed to do it by large corporations whose business model depends on convincing you to not value that information you’re sharing as much as advertisers do.

Yeah, for me this has always been about control, not privacy.  I’ll share what *I* want and keep private what *I* choose.  Thanks.  Facebook has just proven that we need to question what we post to any network.  Like anyone else’s bottom line is different from Zuckerdouche’s?