Facebook: Its product is you

“Facebook has murdered privacy,” said Jessica Guynn in the Los Angeles Times. The popular social network last week unleashed a dramatic redesign of its interface that will seduce users to “divulge more about their lives” than ever before. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the new sharing functions will “help tell the story of your life,’’ letting users tell their friends in real time what they’re reading, watching, hearing, eating, and consuming. Log on, and you’ll get a flood of updates on what your Facebook buddies are doing that instant. If they’re listening to Jay-Z, you can click a link and listen along. The point, of course, is for Facebook to collect vast amounts of data on consumer choices, and use it “to sell more fine-tuned advertising,” said Somini Sengupta and Ben Sisario in The New York Times. To further monetize its 800 million users, the company has formed partnerships with Spotify, Netflix, and Yahoo, companies that distribute music, movies, and news. For Facebook, “the potential payoff is huge.”

People always gripe about evolutionary changes to Facebook at first, said Makena Cahill in Boston​Herald.com, but then grow to accept and like them. The more we share, the easier it is to “connect in more meaningful ways with the people we know.” Users will be particularly excited by a new “Timeline’’ feature that allows them to construct their life stories with years of tags, posts, friends, and photos. Don’t want to? You can always opt out. “We’ve been given more control, and now it’s up to us to use it.” Facebook keeps pushing us to make more of our private lives public, said Eric Mack in PCWorld, but so far, “the benefits have outweighed the cost for most users.” That doesn’t mean, however, that customers shouldn’t keep the pressure up on Zuckerberg to provide opt-outs and privacy guarantees.

Don’t expect anything but an illusion of privacy, said Douglas Rushkoff in CNN.com. Facebook’s real customers are not its 800 million free users but “the companies who actually pay”—for your data and your eyeballs. That’s why every time Facebook announces changes, users freak out. They’ve “awakened from the net trance” long enough to realize that “they don’t trust Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg.” And seductive as the spell his creation casts over our entire lives, users shouldn’t trust him. “That’s because on Facebook we’re not the customers. We are the product.”

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