This Guy Is Selling All His Facebook Data on eBay: “I realized that I’d been selling my data for free for ages, and decided it was time to cash in.” : r/technology

I don’t really agree - there seems to be a weird subset of reddit.. I’m not sure if it’s just smug “you people are all dumb I knew better all along” or some more nefarious propaganda-based angle, but regardless..

Websites that provides genuinely free services have existed for a long time. Smaller sites run by people out of pocket for enjoyment’s sake, hobbies and games, et cetera. What happened is that certain groups jumped in on this and realized hey, we can provide some ‘service’ or another and, in doing so, cash in on people without them knowing.

Is it “in the ToS”? Sure, but those are literally impossible to parse as a layman and, what’s more, nobody in the real world has the time to do so even if they could understand it.. and even if you did, then what? You don’t use it so you can’t use email or other social media? You lose touch with family? You can’t get emails from work?

In a rough sense people agreed to what is happening, but the utter lack of any kind of control over one’s own data, the comical mishandling of it and constant “loss” of it, breaches, misuse of it, etc. are all inexcusable and I think it’s wildly misleading to just throw your hands up and go “PEOPLE AGREED TO IT LOL” like that’s the end of the story.

Never in the past when you sign up for a site did it say “hey, we’re gonna sell your data so you can use this service - seems fair, right?” It was always “FREE FREE LOOK AT HOW FREE THIS IS” and, especially in the younger days of the web, there wasn’t really a reason to look too far beyond that.

I would argue that they have tried very hard all along to act like their service was truly free and to bury any and all actions they took with your data for financial purposes from your view and control.