“If you aren’t paying for the product, you’re the product” never really made much concrete sense until this morning. The folks over at Boing Boing posted an image from @TheBakeryLDN illustrating what companies know when customers login to their services via Facebook.
I suppose much of this could be expected, I posted about the increasingly insistent and irritating way that Facebook tells me it wants my data a few months ago (“The Facebook Database Must Be Fed”) complete with Little Shop of Horrors imagery. What I found most interesting about this image, however, is that access to user information—all provided under equal conditions on Facebook—appears to be sold at different tiers to FB’s corporate customers. So, not only are we the product, but parts of us are worth more than others. (A colleague of mine quipped this morning that this is exactly what will happen to his body after he dies.)
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