Somehow I feel this article hasn't gone through an editor.
Here are a few examples:
> In Europe, laws give people the right to know what data companies have about them, but that is not the case in the United States.
This sentence primes the audience for a discussion of the laws, but that anticipation is never fulfilled. The article jumps to a new topic immediately.
> Ads that pop up on your screen might seem useful, or at worst, a nuisance. But they are much more than that. The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you. Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.
Yes advertising uses the same 'bits and bytes' about your life to determine targeted ads, but you can't co-mingle the idea of advertising and the drastic case of being turned down on insurance because of a Facebook posting you made.
The premise of the article is that Facebook uses you, in that they use your personal data. It's true, but they use your data for advertisement and not for the other more troubling purposes the article talks about.
The author appears to want to set up a slippery slope argument by saying that simply because a market exists for personal data beyond advertising, then Facebook will either (a) sell their corpus to those companies that already provide the service or (b) start providing those services themselves.
It's possible, but there's no evidence suggesting that it is occurring already or is likely to occur in the future---businesses don't enter new industries merely because they can; there's always a cost to diversifying and for Facebook the cost of selling user-data to let employers make hiring decisions is the loss of their dominance in social networking. Once its known that the information you give you Facebook can be used for more than advertising, people likely will stop giving that information. Facebook can make a one-time sale, but loses on the chance to continue reaping ad-profits.
Why would they kill their cash-cow and core business just for dubious short-term gain?
Here are a few examples:
> In Europe, laws give people the right to know what data companies have about them, but that is not the case in the United States.
This sentence primes the audience for a discussion of the laws, but that anticipation is never fulfilled. The article jumps to a new topic immediately.
> Ads that pop up on your screen might seem useful, or at worst, a nuisance. But they are much more than that. The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you. Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.
Yes advertising uses the same 'bits and bytes' about your life to determine targeted ads, but you can't co-mingle the idea of advertising and the drastic case of being turned down on insurance because of a Facebook posting you made.
The premise of the article is that Facebook uses you, in that they use your personal data. It's true, but they use your data for advertisement and not for the other more troubling purposes the article talks about.
The author appears to want to set up a slippery slope argument by saying that simply because a market exists for personal data beyond advertising, then Facebook will either (a) sell their corpus to those companies that already provide the service or (b) start providing those services themselves.
It's possible, but there's no evidence suggesting that it is occurring already or is likely to occur in the future---businesses don't enter new industries merely because they can; there's always a cost to diversifying and for Facebook the cost of selling user-data to let employers make hiring decisions is the loss of their dominance in social networking. Once its known that the information you give you Facebook can be used for more than advertising, people likely will stop giving that information. Facebook can make a one-time sale, but loses on the chance to continue reaping ad-profits.
Why would they kill their cash-cow and core business just for dubious short-term gain?