A lot of people these days think Facebook has become an incorrigible, toxic “regime of one-sided, highly profitable surveillance” under the near-absolute control of a “sovereign and singular ruler,” as University of North Carolina information scholar Zeynep Tufekci summed up in Wired a couple of weeks ago.
I’m not sure the harshest Facebook critics are right. I agree, though, that the company is different even from rival miners of user data, such as Google. Google provides discrete services (search, email, maps, etc.) in exchange for exploiting what it learns from its users’ behavior to better target ads. At Facebook, the targeting and the core service seem inseparable.