Mark Zuckerberg really wants the world to know that Facebook doesn't "sell people's data," and he'll take any opportunity he can to prove it.
Experts would point out that the social network sells advertising spots tailored to users' interests, which it learns via their data. And they'd say Cambridge Analytica sure got a lot of information from Facebook, perhaps for a fee.
But "selling people’s information to advertisers would be counter to our business interests," Zuckerberg claimed Friday in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he says provides "the facts about Facebook." The op-ed is an apparently clarification of Facebook's mission as it turns 15 years old next month.
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Zuckerberg starts his op-ed by describing Facebook in his usually positive way, calling it "a service people could use to connect and learn about each other." But since the company's founding, advertisers have started to learn things about people, too. Facebook collects data "based on what pages people like" and "what they click on" and filters those people into categories, and then "charge[s] advertisers to show ads to that category," Zuckerberg explains. That advertising revenue lets Facebook remain free for users.
So, like Zuckerberg has repeatedly claimed and said again Friday, advertisers don't pay Facebook and directly get a data dump. But charging advertisers for data-driven ad spots, yet claiming it's not selling data, is "like a bar's giving away a free martini with every $12 bag of peanuts and then claiming that it's not selling drinks," Stanford University professor Michal Kosinski explained in a New York Times op-ed in December. And that's only touching on the policies, reports, and scandals Facebook has openly discussed.
Read the op-ed at The Wall Street Journal.
