This is hyperbolic. Facebook isn't evil, selling ads isn't evil and they have no intention or incentive to violate anyone's privacy.
They don't sell secrets about your life, they allow advertisers to target ads based on demographics, location and categories of interest. This does not mean they say "Hey advertisers, Jane Smith likes to do drugs with her friends and take embarrassing pictures. Sell her stuff!". It's more "Show my ad to women between the ages of 18-24 in Portland, OR who have an interest in rock music". It's just boring, not evil and not an invasion of anyone's privacy. Mailing lists have been segmenting audiences for decades, often with much more personal information, and no one is freaking out about it.
The facebook model of advertising is stupid anyway. They have the potential to use unimaginable amounts of information to infer who is most like to buy what from whom. Instead of using it to the fullest extent, they let advertisers select their own targeting criteria based on tiny sample sizes and gut intuitions about who their ideal customers are. You have nothing to fear from this, it's just advertising, same as it's always been.
If you don't like using facebook, just don't use it. The sky won't fall, the dead won't rise and the sun will come up tomorrow. They aren't doing any more harm than any other corporation, and the use of their product isn't any more requisite than any other product.
> [...] selling ads isn't evil and they have no intention or incentive to violate anyone's privacy
Depends on your perspective. Take eating meat. A butcher doesn't think that selling meat is evil, but I'd bet that cows would.
I've done work in advertising, but it's now on the list of things I won't work on. The basic purpose of almost all advertising is to manipulate people into buying stuff. I've come to see that manipulation as immoral. I think it's also an enormous waste: so many bright, creative people putting their lives into something that produces no net systemic benefit. Advertising is an arms race between companies, and we could re-purpose circa $1 trillion annually if we declared an armistice.
Your definition of net systemic advertising is rather different to mine. There are multiple products I wouldn't know about, and wouldn't have bought, without advertising. Yes, those adverts can be misleading, but they also give me the information I need to make purchasing choices.
You mean net systemic value? You've only described a gross local value, and you haven't fully examined your contrafactual.
For net systemic value to be better than a world without advertising, you would have to count not just your personal positives and nothing else but individual positives and negatives both in the actual world and in the contrafactual.
For example, a lot of people have died from cancer caused by tobacco advertising, and things like the car accidents and liver failures that result from alcohol advertising. That's the actual negative side. You've assumed that in the contrafactual you just never would have heard about those products. But people hear about products all the time without advertising, so that's unproven. Perhaps in a world without ads we'd have more things like Consumer Reports and The Wirecutter, yielding better-informed decisions.
You also ignore the not-as-good products you're using because you never heard about the better ones with smaller advertising budgets. Think of all the folks using inappropriate Microsoft and Oracle products just because their bosses saw an ad. Similarly, you ignore how you've missed out on the products that don't exist because their companies were crushed via large advertising budgets. E.g., all the good beer that wasn't drunk because Budweiser out-advertised the small breweries.
And you also ignore the opportunity cost of advertising. I know a lot of smart, creative people who devote their lives to trying to shift market share from one essentially equivalent product to another. And for the most part, their work is canceled out by people from other advertising agencies. What if that money was spent on R&D, or just given back to the customers? What if those people were doing something that made the world better?
For net systemic value to be positive, the social benefits (product discovery is the only one you mention) would have to be greater than the costs. I don't think advertising actually helps, in net, with product discovery, but if it did I don't believe the value created even covers the $1 trillion or so in direct costs, let alone things like MS SQL Server and lung cancer.
Even if the benefits did cover all that (which I deny strongly) then I don't think it justifies the opportunity costs as compared with a world where people found their products through Consumer Reports and we spent the spare $1 trillion on something useful.
"Facebook sells your data" was always a stupid charge. Why would they give away their most valuable asset when they can make more money by renting indirect access to it (targeted ads). There are actual data brokers who do sell your data and none of them make anywhere near what Facebook makes. Facebook actually has an incentive to protect your data.
They don't sell secrets about your life, they allow advertisers to target ads based on demographics, location and categories of interest. This does not mean they say "Hey advertisers, Jane Smith likes to do drugs with her friends and take embarrassing pictures. Sell her stuff!". It's more "Show my ad to women between the ages of 18-24 in Portland, OR who have an interest in rock music". It's just boring, not evil and not an invasion of anyone's privacy. Mailing lists have been segmenting audiences for decades, often with much more personal information, and no one is freaking out about it.
The facebook model of advertising is stupid anyway. They have the potential to use unimaginable amounts of information to infer who is most like to buy what from whom. Instead of using it to the fullest extent, they let advertisers select their own targeting criteria based on tiny sample sizes and gut intuitions about who their ideal customers are. You have nothing to fear from this, it's just advertising, same as it's always been.
If you don't like using facebook, just don't use it. The sky won't fall, the dead won't rise and the sun will come up tomorrow. They aren't doing any more harm than any other corporation, and the use of their product isn't any more requisite than any other product.