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.
One thing I find it odd that I don’t ever see mentioned is the most obvious: private data is money and power for companies. Do you like X (meta, google, literal moronic x, etc) company that much that you want to donate money to them and make them more powerful?
Almost no one would say yes. They don’t care about their privacy, but they certainly don’t think poor zuckeberg needs some donations and more power.
It’s by far the biggest reason I care about my data. If I liked the company I wouldn’t mind the donation. But only evil companies would try to profit from personal data, so that can’t exist. My hate for these companies and my wish to see them destroyed far outweighs my concern with my privacy.
That includes governments of course. The one with the most spying, like the US or israel are the ones I hate the most and try as much as I can to not give them more power.
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.
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.
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.