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vanuatu

not to defend zuck but its a common misconception that meta sells data

advertisers dont see the personal data they buy for ad placement

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There is no misconception. Meta also sells data, next to selling advertising space.

They literally don't. Data is their moat; selling it would be counter to their financial success.

Well not in bulk to its advertisement competitors as you seem to suggest. But as a different revenue stream, data collectors sell the collected information. Don't be naive, of course they do, first customer are governments.

no, it doesn't sell user data. or, where can I buy some?

Brokers. Acxiom and Experian for starters.

Heck, you can buy facebook datasets right now from brightdata.

https://brightdata.com/products/datasets/facebook

Don't you recall the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica

All corporates sell your data. You're a fool to think otherwise, data makes dosh, and you can sell any data for a price.

Data is a commodity.

There are current ten plus folk in the subway carriage I am sitting in right now. Toss me £10 and I'll give you a dataset of ten people of what colour tops they're wearing and what brand of shoe and colour.

And yes you can sell your internet data too.

https://www.moneymagpie.com/make-money/make-money-selling-yo...

this is just not correct.

the brightdata link is a data set scraped from Facebook, not sold by Facebook

Cambridge Analytica was the same thing, scraped from Facebook by people who voluntarily (perhaps ignorantly) gave their data to quiz apps like "what kind of horse are you?"

Facebook does not sell user data, and it never has

its not a misconception. As an advertiser, I can go use meta's tools, target people specifically, and show them ads on meta's platform. While i don't get the CSV dump, but if i can target people with my message, its the same thing. Meta keeps the data AND the distribution. Data brokers have the data but no distribution of attention for that data. Newspapers have distribution but don't have the granualar data for direct targeting.

There are many, many use cases of having a CSV dump of the data, but in reality, all of it boils down to either reselling the data, or marketing a product to the demographic in the data.

The 3rd use case is that of palantir but let's not get distracted.

So, meta is not selling data is like saying netflix is not selling movies (its actually buying them). Technically true, but a shallow understanding.

i dont think targeted ads are necessarily bad, and definitely not has bad as the data freely shared vs. behind meta's walls

and what is this 3rd use case?

Why should anyone at all care about this distinction?

i care that my data isnt being sold

i dont really care that i get targeted ads, in fact i prefer targeted ads vs. ones that are of no use to me

Really do you care that your daughters are being advertised beauty products at the exact moment that they delete a photo because it's likely that they're feeling low self esteem at that moment? Because that's a service that you used to be able to buy from Meta.

i think some targeted ads are bad

and social media is probably bad

Why wouldn't Meta also directly sell data if nobody cared about this distinction?

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