MAIL ONLINE: Log off! As Facebook plans a $5bn stock market float, one trenchant sceptic describes how the social network is ruthlessly selling your soul
The announcement that Facebook, the social media giant, is planning a $5bn float on the stock market – valuing the company at $100bn – has led to a frenzy of speculation about the fortunes its young founders will rake in. There will be hundreds of new millionaires, we hear, and several new billionaires, too.
But in all this hysteria about the vast sums involved, has anyone thought to question what exactly Facebook is selling? The answer is both obvious and sinister: You.
Terrifyingly, the social networking site turns you into a product. It makes your friendships, marriages and children into a product.
Facebook tells its users: ‘It’s free and always will be.’ Now consider this bit of wisdom: ‘If you’re not paying, you’re not the customer; you’re the product.’
The site — founded by famously low-key American Mark Zuckerberg — has always presented itself as a sort of altruistic social service. Its tagline reads: ‘Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.’
Now that sounds fairly harmless. What sort of curmudgeon could object to connecting and sharing?
In actual fact, though, Facebook is a gigantic, and really quite frightening, advertising scam. Its business model is to collect information about individual consumers (you) and sell that information back to advertisers. » | Tom Hodgkinson | Friday, February 03, 2012
