I had a great discussion with my co-host on GamesAtWork.Biz Michael Martine the other day over lunch, on why I am going to turn off Facebook. While I have been pretty vocal over the years with friends and acquaintances on why I won’t use Android (you are the product), I have always rationalized using Facebook as it allows me to promote things I am doing (this blog, my podcast, the shows I perform in, and cool things going on at work). And while the value of this promotion may be suspect (we’ve been losing listeners on our podcast for years), the idea that it was helpful was keeping this going.
It has long been said that when you use a free service, you (or your data) are the product. This has long been true of Facebook. Facebook’s business model is all about leveraging the value of your freely shared data, to sell insights to advertisers. As a consumer, the value should be better targeted ads. An event happened a few years back which has made me very aggressive in the active sharing of this information, and it is one of the reasons that I have for some time gone in once a month or week and cleared any insights from the data Facebook thinks it has from me (if you’ve not done this … I highly recommend going to https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences to see all the things Facebook knows). Every week this data grows and grows, with more “insights” about you, your preferences, your market segmentation, etc.
I recently did a fully Facebook data download (thank you GDPR!) and took a look what FB still had. AS you see in the previous post the data is still being captured, and my guess is used by Facebook, even though I had turned on the highest level of “privacy”. I believe this will continue to happen, as Facebook’s business model is to sell insights about me. This is the same reason why I no longer use Google as my default search engine. I am NOT a product, and as such, my mental model is – I want control of my data, and I want your business model not to conflict with my data privacy. In a world where more and more of what we do, and who we are, is captured in online systems, why should I support those who are not aligned with my privacy.
You may ask, why don’t I just restrict my usage of Facebook? Well, the value of Facebook is the network model it builds. It’s not just my data, but all the data about my data that is generated by Friends and Friends of Friends. So even if I refuse to allow people to tag me in pictures, it doesn’t stop others from trying. Facebook will let me know that they are trying to do so, and that data point is now in the network. Even the fact that I looked at the picture to say “no” is another piece of valuable information. At a certain point, the system can ignore my “no” flags, as 100’s of other data points say – Yes – that’s Michael. Think about it, you are not in control of your data. Just look how many times you see “Michael” is with “Someone”, based on “Someone” deciding to post that they are out and about.