Author Topic: Facebook made simple  (Read 3505 times)

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Offline Maik

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Facebook made simple
« on: Friday, 05 December, 2014 @ 14:09:55 »
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Facebook is not a public utility – and your data is a small price for a free service
Running a website like Facebook is expensive. There is only one way to keep it free for users

Because so many of us use Facebook – well over a billion now – in so many aspects of our personal and professional lives, any changes to its terms and conditions are a pretty big deal. The latest change, which comes into force on 1 January 2015 has caused some consternation: that it's too long, too complex, and dramatically extends how much data Facebook collects about you, and what it does with it. We have mistakenly come to think of Facebook as a public utility, as something that belongs to us, the people. Partly this is because we’ve got used to it all being free and partly because it’s just become part of the cultural furniture. As a result, we conveniently forget that Facebook is a private company, with noisy shareholders demanding profits.

Running a site with so many users is not cheap. We don’t pay for any of it. We get an incredibly well designed, efficient, reliable service which allows us to connect, debate, and discuss with millions of people around the world, host and share content, look at other people's holiday photos. This is all pretty remarkable. And it's all free. Free!

Except it's not free, of course. Facebook pays for and owns the thousands of servers that host all our inane content. Then there's all the well-paid and well-qualified engineers, programmers, and software designers that keeps the whole thing going. A site of this size also has social and legal responsibilities – such as trying to remove illegal content of the site – which means banks of lawyers, policy teams and so on.

That’s why Facebook wants your data – it’s the deal. As the saying goes, if you’re not paying, you’re the product and you pay for this with your data.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/11273329/Facebook-is-not-a-public-utility-and-your-data-is-a-small-price-for-a-free-service.html


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I Asked a Privacy Lawyer What Facebook's New Terms and Conditions Will Mean for You
http://www.vice.com/read/i-asked-a-lawyer-how-facebooks-new-terms-will-affect-my-online-life-183