Not to the extend that what Facebook does, they keep track of who and when you interact with them, then blast you with advertising, and they pass your information to those advertisers, now they can dig even deeper with the new whats app. How far will they take this. People need to understand that these companies revenue comes from advertising, they do not manufacture anything. You thought the NSA was bad.
I understand that fully. As I said before, they're going to advertise crap to me whether I like it or not. If they gather data and find out the things I might be interested in and serve me ads for those kinds of things, I much prefer that to ads for garbage that I'll never want or need.
And again, you have a Google phone with Google apps. I'm assuming you have a gmail account with all of that. You do know why Google Now can remind you of events based on emails that you've received and track packages that you've received tracking information on via email, don't you? Because their computers are already reading all of your emails anyway, so they figure they'll toss you a bone while they mine your data. Think about that the next time you forget a password somewhere and have a site send you information to reset it. If they really wanted to, don't you think they could get into ANY account you own? Google is, first and foremost, an advertising company. The only reason they started the search engine was purely from the standpoint of simple market research. "People want to find things easily on the internet. If we curate the information on the internet and make it easy for them to search for it, we can gather data on what they're looking for and use it."
If I had to choose, I'd much rather have Facebook know what I choose to share with other people than have Google reading my private emails, but I really don't have anything to hide, so I don't care either way.
Again, you're fully entitled to your own opinions, but please don't assume that all people who use Facebook are uninformed or unaware of what's going on. I've made a conscious decision to stay on Facebook even after I learned these things in the same way that that I made a conscious decision to keep my gmail account and use Google products.
I'm fully aware that I have become a "product" and that information on me is being sold left and right, but if the worst thing that comes from it is seeing ads for things that I might actually have use for, I'm ok with it.
