Facebook Privacy!

No, it is not fake news, it is not just a rumour which went viral.

Your Facebook posts are NOT private. They never have been. It is important to recognize that we Facebook users are not Facebook's customers! In fact we are the commodity.

Our posts and our information is what they sell to make money. Why else does Whatsapp never come good its threat to charge us 'starting next year'?

Yet, we use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Flickr, Tumblr, Imgur, FourSquare... Weibo and everything in between. There is even something called ‘43Things’. Go figure!

There are software service companies who sell Data Analysis tools which can hook into your Social Networking stream, parse through all that 'unstructured' data using tools like Hadoop, make sense out of it and provide a dashboard full of charts as big as a Rajini cut out at Satyam theatre on Kabali opening day.

And there are hundreds of such companies using these dashboards to figure out what ads can be placed when you are reading news online and what spam can be sent to your Gmail ‘Promotions’ folder. Which is why it is unforgivable that Flipkart still tries to sell me an expensive phone after I have already bought an expensive phone from their very website; though that strategy works well on consumables, like Firstcry.in putting up diaper ads on whichever site I go to!

Yet, this is fake news. Not only is it fake news, it is fake news from nearly 4 years ago! Please stop copy-pasting it on your walls! FB is not going to make all your posts ‘Public’. Even people who have never bothered to change their post privacy settings from ‘Public’ are copy-pasting this stupidity on their walls!

Stop eet! Eva ava…
(BTW, why copy-paste and not share? I would never figure that logic out!)