Why do we care?

Imagine you’re talking to your loved ones about something very personal. you don’t know it, but someone is listening to your conversation. This person then writes down your whole conversation that you have and sends it to every company in the town. Then every company sends you mail asking you to buy their products, and in their mailings, they mention details of your private conversation!… Wouldn’t you feel uncomfortable, angry, betrayed or deceived? Well, this is exactly what Facebook does. I assume that the Facebook advertising business is not welfare due to what they get versus us, Facebook gets benefits more than us. This is why we should not use facebook because it’s not worth it to trade your privacy with things that want to sell it to you. 

We were born in the generation that technology started to effettive our lives so it’s a new thing that we need to learn more about. Facebook is one of the social media platforms that has changed most of our lives And according to Webster, nearly 80% of people between the ages of 12-24 use Facebook  and they all have a personal profile which is like enforcing everybody to put their information about themselves in order to make an account. Most of them have a Facebook account just because it’s convenient for them to login to other websites without remembering many usernames and passwords. 

At the same time, Facebook has been using our information to target us with ads that interest us so that we’re more likely to click on them. Even though Facebook says they might look at your private conversation in chat just to define if they violate the company rules and they won’t use the contents of your messages to target you with ads. My mom has experienced this situation. When me and my family were having dinner my mom told me that her glasses frame just broke and all the glasses ads appeared from nowhere even though they did give a decent offer but my mom didn’t buy them either. I still don’t trust what Facebook said because they don’t explain more about the way their app listens to real life conversations that we are having and use that information to  bring up advertisers related exactly to what we’re talking about. 

Facebook sells our information?

People might not know the details about how Facebook advertising businesses work. Everything in this world right now is full of advertisements and business. You can see advertisements on Youtube, Instagram, Pinterest, even websites that we’ve been going through are full of advertisements and surely Facebook has them too. 

This Facebook advertisement is a huge business for Facebook. In fact, so many companies advertise on Facebook that in 2017, Facebook earned $39.9 billion from advertising revenue. All in all, the company earns about 85% of its money from advertising. Facebook sells our information to the advertisers and they can target us with their product and we can buy it, Facebook ads may also contain malware. Facebook is a free application to download. Definitely they need to make money in some way and this is how they got money in order to maintain their platform.

Facebook is regularly asked to access third parties so that our information is being shared with third parties such as Snapchat, Uber, and Spotify.

How Facebook collects our information is from our data like what we post, such as videos or status updates, as well as other content we view on the feed, what we search, real life conversations, our photo, and what we post about. They will always keep an eye on us. If they know what we’re interested in at that moment they will bring up all the advertising about it everywhere. According to Arwa Mahdawi, “The fact that marketers are able to serve me ads for yoga mats the moment after I’ve booked a yoga class.”  Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist and brand strategist based in New York. She said it’s not worth it to trade our privacy information or being stalked because of that and I agree with her because we shouldn’t have someone watch us on everything we do. This seems to be disrespectful for the users and dangerous for our generation.

If our generation closes all of our Facebook accounts and refuses to play by Facebook’s rules, the customers will decrease and it will affect their advertisement business which is their one of main profit, and they need to think about restricting the way that they get our information if they want us back on their platform.