Privacy and the Internet Giants - 1 February 2024

Twelve years ago, Facebook went public as a multi-billion dollar company.  On today's market, Facebook (now META) has a market cap of $1T and a user base between 2 billion and 3 billion, depending on who is counting what.  This suggests that the value of a Facebook user has gone up from about $6 to about $333 (very roughly).  Why such a significant rise?  Does Facebook offer more value and function to you today than it did a decade ago?  Not really.  55x more value and function?  Far from it.  The stock market has assigned the price, so where does this value come from?

In a recent report from Consumer Reports, "Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies."  And as noted by Bruce Schneier, "This isn’t data about your use of Facebook. This data about your interactions with other companies, all of which is correlated and analyzed by Facebook."

This is not Facebook/META alone - this is all the big Internet companies, including a bunch you do not know about like Palantir Technologies.  You are not a hapless victim.  Contact your representatives and senators to demand protection.  Consumer Reports probably has some good suggestios of where to start.