[From article]
The recent announcement that Facebook would soon target ads using your “likes” and “shares” has triggered some Olympic-level teeth- gnashing from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, because Facebook will get information from you not just when you actually like, “like” something, but when you load a page that has a “like” button on it.
The EFF wants Facebook to agree to use a “Do Not Track” standard that will keep all that potentially profitable data from the greedy eyes of advertisers.
Of course people should be able to hide data about what sites they use. But there’s a perfectly good way to do this: Stay signed out of Facebook and tell your browser not to accept cookies or otherwise let advertisers follow you around.
The problem is, this level of security is incredibly inconvenient, because you have to spend a lot of time painfully re-entering data. The other problem is that naive users, who probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about privacy, won’t bother.
[. . .]
There’s an old saying in advertising: If you can’t figure out what’s being sold, then you’re the product.
“Free” products and services usually aren’t; someone has to finance them, and if they’re not charging you for your use, then they’re charging someone else to use you.
Privacy-obsessed folks who carefully hide their activity from the Internet, and ad-hating readers who install blockers, are effectively having their free media and social media platforms subsidized by the folks who don’t know or don’t mind. Because someone has to read the ads that pay the bills.
[. . .]
Privacy matters, but privacy isn’t free. And the best people to assess the tradeoffs between privacy, access, and convenience are probably the individuals wielding the mouse, rather than the activists wielding the megaphone.
http://nypost.com/2015/10/10/yes-facebook-is-stalking-you-thats-the-price-of-free-social-media/
Yes, Facebook is stalking you — that’s the price of ‘free’ social media
By Megan McArdle
New York Post
October 10, 2015 | 5:15am
