Imagine how crazy that would have sounded not even that many years hence. In the near future, central banks and hedge funds will me reliant on a social media app where people share pictures of food and cats. Nobody would have believed it.
Yeah true. The best part is that the ignorant public believes that this is how these social media companies actually make money.... with memes, cat pics and grandmas baked goods.
Not even close. They make 99.9% of the money from selling user data to other companies, who then use that data to target ad campaigns, email and telemarketing.... and sell to govt agencies to spy on us.
So when a social media company like Facebook essentially tells their investors that they have stopped growing more user accounts, the investors dump the stock. Because they are not going to pay the same subscriber money to FB for access to the *exact same user account data* as they paid for last year, and the year before that, and so on. They already have that data.
Precisely! And then what can they do? Create bots and sell their data? Facebook is backing itself into a corner pretty quick here, and they're gonna get despirate soon.
Data privacy has always been a big lie. But what can we do as consumers, really? Either you don't use their services (and don't exist as far as most people are concerned) or you suck it up and let them sell your data. Google will even listen in on conversations and then throw up relevant ads based on what you're talking about. Really. I've got a friend who worked in an advertising agency with them.